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.”

Peter Bruce

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.

In my MBA program, I took a liking to statistics. My professor, Frank Alt, thought I had an aptitude for the subject because I paid close attention in class, took few notes, and scored well on exams.
Simon showed me his own work on resampling—his 1969 text Basic Research Methods in Social Science had a compendium of permutation and bootstrap illustrations—and I caught the bug. Leaving aside the statistical advantages and attributes of resampling methods, their do-it-yourself nature was sheer fun.

Simon had invented a software program for these procedures, Resampling Stats, and I took on the further development and marketing of it. From that point, my statistics was mostly self-taught, aided by many lengthy sessions with Simon, developing resampling illustrations and documentation. Simon also was instrumental in guiding me in the establishment and growth of our small business. (Another of his accomplishments was authoring a best-selling text on setting up and running a direct mail business.)

My involvement with the ASA and its meetings and activities dates from that time. I taught introductory statistics courses with a strong resampling flavor at the University of Maryland. I also taught professional development courses in resampling statistics for the Institute for Professional Education and other organizations. After Simon died in 1998, I continued to market the Resampling Stats software, but I looked for further opportunities.

I began working part time at Cytel Software. I had met both Cyrus Mehta and Nitin Patel, owners of Cytel, at the Joint Statistical Meetings and other events over the years. Mehta was interested in implementing a direct mail campaign similar to those Simon and I created to market Resampling Stats software. (Direct mail and, now, certain forms of variable Internet offers represent the purest form of controlled experiments and, done properly, are excellent fodder for statisticians.)

There was some commonality between Resampling Stats and Cytel’s StatXact software (though the audiences were completely different), and I worked with Patel on an NSF grant to fund development of an “urn sampler” program and curriculum. My relationship with Patel felt like part graduate student, part colleague. In my many sessions with him, I saw his white board constantly filled with ever-changing sets of equations. In the upper left was one fixed piece of advice: “With all thy getting, get understanding.” The urn sampler name was later changed to box sampler because another collaborator could not dispel from her mind the association of urns with cremains. Later, I also partnered with Cytel to market an Excel-based data mining program, XLMiner, and reconnected with the University of Maryland, coauthoring a data mining text with Galit Shmueli of the business school (and Patel).

Meanwhile, I was casting about for something to do with the website statistics.com. I had obtained that domain in the early days of the Internet, but had been using it only as an adjunct to software marketing efforts. About 10 years ago, I built a data portal into it—a search directory of data sources. This was based on the “build it and they will come” theory and on the further theory that “if they come, you can make money.” The advent of Google quickly rendered the data search portal idea hopelessly obsolete, so I never tested that second theory. Finally, I came upon the idea of developing an online short course that, in terms of cost and convenience, would lie somewhere between existing professional development courses (2–3 days of all-day training in person) and simply getting and reading a book.

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