My Experience Taking Udacity’s Free Statistics Intro Course

When I took my first statistics class in college, around my third semester, I didn’t like it at all. Even though I was ok at it, I just didn’t put much effort into it.

The same happened to many of the other classes I took. I did ok on most, and some I was pretty good at.

Economics, Finances, and especially Marketing were some of those I actually enjoyed.

I used to think that I did ok on those just because I liked them more. That belief has some truth in it.

But it’s not the full reason.

Now I know I was better at those not only because I liked them more, but because I saw them more relevant to what I wanted in life.

Around the time I was doing my third semester, I was also getting more in the depths of the internet. I went from being a casual internet user to spending entire days browsing around it, engaging in forums, tweaking my pc, and all of that nerdy stuff.

I believe I’ve always been the only kid in my circle of friends that used the internet for different things than logging to Facebook, playing online games, and researching for homework.

At the time I didn’t know why, but I was being shown ads about business topics. The reason is obvious now.

I searched for business-related concepts for homework, then those websites I visited tracked me, then advertisers in the industry could target me.

One type of ad I was always shown was about online marketing, and I somehow ended up liking it. Maybe because of how the ads depicted the marketer life.

So, marketing being the business area I liked the most, and economics and finances the other areas I thought were actually relevant, no wonder why I did better at those.

Statistics? Nope. Not a single one of the gurus talking about marketing seemed to emphasize the importance of it so why pay attention to it?

But now it’s a different story.

After learning more and more about marketing, and doing it the way most do it — Facebook Ads and landing pages — I’m glad I stumbled upon Julian Shapiro.

He was the one that introduced to me the concept of Growth Marketing and how it is the entire puzzle. Marketing channels (e.g. FB Ads) and landing pages were just one piece.

I could say I was a robot following instructions not really knowing the logic of things.

Illustration by Icons 8 from Icons8

Now I know the importance of statistics in business growth. Now I know why I had a hard time finding meaning in numbers.

So, I embarked on a journey where I will learn the fundamentals of Growth in order to do it right this time. Statistics is one of those fundamentals.

And now that it’s relevant I’m actually enjoying learning it through Udacity’s Free Intro to Statistics Course that Brian Balfour recommends in his essay on how to become a customer acquisition expert.

I’ll share my experience, the things I like, and where I struggled taking this course as I go through it.

The structure makes sense

The first thing I like about it is the structure. It starts teasing you with a cool example showing the average friends you’re statistically likely to have. In my case, it was on point.

That just gets you excited about learning statistics instead of just diving into the content right away which could be overwhelming. Some context is always good before doing anything.

Then it goes into explaining why statistics are cool and useful and giving you examples of the different common plots and charts that make reading and interpreting data easy.

From there they introduce the actual concepts of statistics.

Short, interactive lessons that force you to engage.

Another thing I like it’s the fact that the videos are short and there’s always a question you have to answer which forces you to get involved and engage.

With videos this short there’s no time for fluff, which is another thing I appreciate. Just give me the content if there’s nothing else that I need to know and it’s actually relevant.

I believe it also helps you learn quicker because when it tells you that your answer is wrong, it motivates you to keep trying to find the right answer.

It happened to me when I was in lesson 9 (probability). One of the questions was about what the probability of throwing one dice and the outcome were an even number was.

At first, I’d understood it as the probability of getting a double. I think my native spanish thinking got in the way.

So I went to build a truth table in Google Sheets and calculate it the way I had gotten it. I submitted my answer and of course, it was wrong.

The answer was 3/6 but I submitted 6/36. I was confused. After struggling for a while I simply rewatched the lesson, recognized my misinterpretation, and got it right this time.

Being wrong is ok.

Confusion and facing problems, in my opinion, is what makes learning more effective because it forces you to give it a little more thinking and leads you to ask questions to find the solution.

I believe one of the reasons there’s always some people that do better than others in a group is because the ones that do better are not afraid of being wrong. They know is wrong is just one step closer to being right.

While the ones that don’t do as good, hold themselves back, think it twice before participating because of what others will think of them, and consequently limit their learning capacity.

I’ve noticed it in my life. Sometimes I’m afraid of asking a certain question because it ‘looked dumb’. Now that I reflect on it, that’s just a subjective interpretation because in reality is just a question.

Reminds me of Man’s Search For Meaning.

In the eyes of ‘I-know-it-all’ people, it may look dumb. On the other hand, for someone not that arrogant, it’s a great question.

Business-related examples.

I also like the bias towards giving examples related to business, and consequently to growth. That also helps to engage more because it’s relevant to me.

This course, as far as I can tell and according to what I’ve observed other growth and business experts mention about their day to day activities, has everything you need to know about statistics for this world — Correlation, causation, estimation, averages, regression, statistical significance.

Those are some of the terms I hear often and they’re are all included here.

I’ll update this post as I go through the course.