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ASA members Peter Bruce and Jonaki Bose entered the statistics profession later in life. Neither planned to be a statistician. Bose "stumbled onto it and ... never looked back" and Bruce "followed opportunities as they developed." Both took a chance on statistics and, here, they explain the significance the profession has in their lives and careers.
Why Statistics?
Peter Bruce, founder and owner of statistics.com
Winston Churchill once characterized the British plan for World War II this way: "It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time."
Not the sort of career advice you generally give your kids, true, but it certainly characterizes my own situation. When I look back, I see no grand plan to my career path. On the positive side, I guess you could say I am a product of my own flexibility. I've used what I've learned to build my career and followed opportunities as they developed.
I am somewhat of an outlier in this profession. I don't have a degree in statistics or education, but I do have strong interests in both. My undergraduate degree is in Russian language from Princeton; my MA is in Russian studies from Harvard; and I earned an MBA from Maryland. Before coming to statistics, I worked on airline deregulation in the U.S. Transportation Department and served as a career U.S. Foreign Service officer for the better part of a decade.
My entrance into the field of statistics came in 1989, via software. I was at the University of Maryland, where I met Julian Simon. He had read a lengthy article about airline deregulation that I (and a coauthor) had written for the National Review. Simon (best known for bringing an economist's perspective to demography and natural resource studies) was the originator of the scheme by which airlines must bid for volunteers to give up seats when a flight is overbooked. A provocative scholar, Simon championed the lonely view that the world is not over-populated and running out of oil and other natural resources in any meaningful sense. Perhaps his most famous foray into the public arena was his bet with Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, concerning the prices of various natural resources. Simon bet they would decline, while Ehrlich bet they would go up. Simon won.
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