Driving Uphill

Though my Social Psychology doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati was inter-disciplinary (Sociology and Psychology departments), my academic home was in Sociology, which required that I conquer two courses in statistics--descriptive statistics (understanding the characteristics of a data set) and inferential statistics (coming to conclusions and making predictions based on the data). 

This was early in the use of computers, and we used traditional tools for descriptive statistics to determine such outcomes as "central tendency" (mean, median, mode) and standard deviation. Never a math whiz, I was out of my mind with anxiety before the final exam in descriptive statistics. The night before the exam, a dream seared an image in my brain that's still there fifty years later: 

I'm driving up a steep hill toward the university, with my father in the passenger seat, who says, "You'll never pass this exam."

"Why not?" 

"Because you have no balls." 

That was the second time I'd heard that phrase applied to me, both times by men, Beyond the obvious anatomical reality, and the fact that most of the world is controlled by men, it was also true that I was still somewhat passive, not yet clear about my potential and not yet the feminist I would become. Recently divorced, I'd barely realized--after a decade of marriage and two children--that the life I'd been programmed for was not the life I actually wanted. This life that I was moving into was so rich with possibility that I was in constant flux between excitement over entering new intellectual territory and anxiety over its challenges.

The descriptive statistics final was a pencil-and-paper exam, and by the time the test questions were on the desk in front of me, I was shaking so much I had to bear down to keep the pencil on the paper and not flying across the room; I passed, but not before breaking the points off of two pencils before the exam was over.

The next obstacle to overcome was inferential statistics, and though we did have a computer center (remember those cards with hole punched in them?), the class itself only required understanding the concepts, and our instructor, Dr. Feinberg, gave us a take-home, open-book exam for our final. We only had to answer one question: "Explain the Analysis of Covariance." Easy, right? 

I'd managed my schedule to complete all my other courses and exams by Monday morning, so I had the whole week to complete the take-home exam, due Friday at noon. Every evening that week, after the children were in bed, I sat at my portable typewriter with the textbook open on the table, not typing a single word. Weeping.

Finally, at 8:30 on Thursday evening, I began typing, basically summarizing relevant information from the textbook. The children were at their dad's house that night, and would be going directly to school from there, so I had all night, if necessary, to finish the exam. Around 2 a.m. I put a paper clip on the ten pages I'd typed, put the cover on the typewriter and went to bed. By the next morning, I couldn't have told you under oath what was in those ten pages, but I stuck them in an envelope, drove to the university, and left the envelope in Dr. Feinberg's mailbox. 

When the results were announced, I picked up my ten-page exam and was relieved to see an A on the front page. Then a fellow grad student walked up, Sam Sloss. I knew Sam would get an A because he really understood this material, so I looked over at the paper he held in his hand. He'd explained the analysis of covariance in less than half a page!