Lucy Timbrell is one of our Stats@Liverpool tutors who support students by offering one to one support with a range of statistics topics such as choosing statistical tests, using statistical packages and understanding statistical concepts.
Here, Lucy tells a bit about her university experience and how she can support you with using and understanding statistics.
I’m Lucy, and I am one of the new Stats@Liverpool tutors for the University of Liverpool Library KnowHow team! I am a second year PhD student within the Archaeology of Human Origins research group in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology and my research involves modelling population interaction and structure in the eastern African Middle Stone Age.
My academic background never involved statistics until I got to university. I didn’t enjoy maths at all at school and always shied away from anything involving numbers and spreadsheets. However, during my undergraduate degree, my thesis supervisor suggested that I should use geometric morphometrics – a suite of complex shape analysis techniques comprising specialised statistics - as the method for investigating my research questions. I was really hesitant at first because it sounded completely out of my comfort zone, (‘what on earth is geometric morphometrics’ I distinctly remember thinking) but I found that once I had gotten over the first hurdle of understanding the methods, learning and applying statistics within a context that was interesting to me was actually really enjoyable.
As a master’s student and now as a PhD student, I routinely use statistics during research projects, and I can code in two programming languages. If you told secondary school me that I would grow to love coding, I wouldn’t have believed you!
I became a KnowHow tutor in October 2020 to try and help students who are in the same position that I was once in. I was really pleasantly surprised to see the number of useful resources that the KnowHow team had already put together – I knew instantly that I wanted to be involved!
Statistics can be really alien to many people, especially those of us less mathematically minded people, so I think the one-on-one tutoring programme that the KnowHow team offer is particularly valuable. I wish I had been able to use it as an undergraduate! At typically 45 minutes long, the tutoring appointments provide a no-pressure environment where students of all levels can get personalised support with key concepts in statistics.
Usually, we assist students with things like understanding statistical terminology, recognising the difference between tests and troubleshooting statistical packages, although our appointments aren’t designed for generic maths questions and we cannot do your analysis for you!
The best thing about being a Stats@Liverpool tutor is seeing the penny drop when you’re explaining a complex concept to a student. Knowing that you have helped them understand something that they just couldn’t get their head around before is a great feeling!
If you would like support with using and understanding statistics, book a one to one appointment with a Stats@Liverpool tutor.
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