I was sitting in our weekly meeting at the consulting center, and my boss got to talking about students and how some of them do not meet his expectations. He said a senior faculty member told him once that farm kids do the best in the program (which I assume was referring to applied statistics), because they come in with a very practical problem-solving mindset.

On the farm, you have to solve the problem at hand with what you have, and such a skill can be translated into a setting such as applied statistics, where you might have some messy data and a method that sort-of-but-doesn’t-quite fit. So you evaluate what is important and necessary in the data analysis and find a way to make it work.