The people that know better than we do

By Ryan Maloney, assistant women's volleyball coach

Photo credit: Jamie Powell

I created my own course of graduate study two years ago, an interdisciplinary program I called “Exercise Neuroscience.” I wanted the freedom to choose my course of learning, pulling classes from biology, psychology, and exercise science to perfectly fit my interests.

After one semester, my advisor told me I needed to add a research statistics class. If I were going to complete a thesis, I’d need the know-how to prove my research findings. With no background or interest in it, my inner dialogue rebelled, “I don’t need a statistics class for what I want to learn!”

But what I wanted to learn was much different than what I needed to learn. After taking that statistics class, I can’t imagine understanding science, my work, or the world without it.

This is why we go to college in the first place – to meet people who know what we need better than we do.