Trine Blogs: A first for everything

There’s a first time for everything, and it’s usually both memorable and bittersweet.

The first kiss, awkwardly shared in a corner at an under-age disco with all your friends watching. The first time you sorely over-estimate the amount of 40 proof liquor you can successfully hold in your body. The first time you move away from home, matching second-hand sofas with brand-spanking-new IKEA book cases (well done for assembling it in less than 6 hours) in an attempt to save money for beer. And of course, who can forget the first time you accidentally melt your plastic spatula on the stove. (I know everyone’s done that at least once.)

And then there’s that first time you (or I) go batsh*t crazy over an assignment. I’m not talking frustratedly muttering carefully selected cuss words – I’m talking uncontrolled sobbing, facepalming, snot-down-your-chin-and-considering-moving-back-home crazy. My personal kryptonite is statistics. Why do I torture myself this way, you ask? It’s mandatory. No statistics exam, no Master’s thesis. That’s math even I can do.

I consider myself reasonably smart. I’m really good with languages. I’m fairly good with abstract concepts. I’ve memorised all the multiplication songs up to 10 (“I see 3, sitting in a tree, throwing apples at you and me…”) except for 6; I can never remember that one. And then I have this big, gaping black hole labelled “maths, statistics, and all things fairly logical” where most of this knowledge seems to disappear into. That black hole sucks up whatever the books or the teachers tell me, rendering me stupefied when faced with questions like “Is the assumption of normality relevant?”, and “Are these variables correlated?”, and “Hey sis, if I spent 64 kr. of the 70 kr. mum gave us, how much do I have left?” (My answer was 14. Don’t ask.)

Though I have no mathematical prowess at all, I do have good friends. Good friends who, in exchange for food, teach me about hypotheses and regression. Good friends who make other good friends offer their help because aforementioned good friends are as bad at statistics as I am (misery does love company). The crisis has now been averted, and I’m sure that one day me and all my good friends can look back on this and say “Ha ha, do you remember the Statistics Meltdown of 2011?” and laugh awkwardly, hoping it will never happen again.

I wish I was just making this up for good blog fodder, and that I didn’t actually sit Tuesday night with my face in my hands considering jumping on the next plane back to Denmark, where no one forces you to do statistics. (I also wish I hadn’t sent my teacher a long, teary e-mail at midnight exemplary of my crazy condition, or eaten all those donuts to comfort myself. Oh well.) But I take comfort in the fact that you only ever have one “first”, and that that “first” never comes back.

Unfortunately, logic dictates that having had the “first” opens up to the possibility of there one day being an “again”.

… it’s a good thing I’m really bad at logic.

Trine Larsen (23) from Denmark studies Management of Cultural Diversity at Tilburg University and blogs for Univers.