Posted in November 2013

Hello there!

It has already been a month since the last time I posted something, time really goes fast when you’re “studying”… Well lets see what has been going on lately.. Oh yeah, I have survived another exam period! Which was not that hard to do, just sit and study, but this time I also had to do a presentation for the course Bio Environmental Statistics.

This presentation was about the results you had obtain from a project you had to work on (by yourself). We were with only four people (in the whole course) so everyone got a different project, hence a different data-set since this course was all about statistics (as the course name already tells).
My data-set was about two group of mice, one group consisted of ‘regular’ mice while the other were germ free mice. This means that the latter group could not reproduce (if I am correct). However, all mice had a certain chance of getting a (non-lethal) lung tumor. The idea behind the experiment was to check whether one group of mice would have a higher chance of getting this lung tumor.

First, I must say that this was quite interesting and hard to do! For me, this was the first time I would do a statistical project on my own with a real data set. So you cannot expect neat models and nice answers. After some struggling I eventually had some results for both the groups. The conclusion was that one would expect that the germ-free mice ‘obtained’  the tumor earlier than the regular mice.

This conclusion came from the distribution I fitted to both the data-sets. But before I could fit a distribution to the data-set I had to do all sorts of non-parametric approaches to get a good guess of which distribution would fit best. This was all done in the setting of a current status model.
All together I learned a whole lot and in a few days I will have an oral examination for this course, the exams of my other two courses will be done in January.

More fun (study related) news!

I finally managed to get an internship at the company… TNO. I hope those guys don’t read this, but actually they were my second choice. Last summer I first tried to get an internship at Ortec (finance), but this did not work out… So I was glad I’ve already had a backup plan and had some contact with TNO beforehand.
Most of the time it is not that hard to get an internship at a company. But there are some thing that you might want to think about before you contact a company.

First of all, why do you want to get there? What drives you to work for them and why do you like to do that? After that, when you have send your resume and motivation letter and you do get an invitation for an interview, then keep in mind how the company thinks.
They want to know what their gain is, why would they benefit of your presence? Does your education level agrees with theirs? Do you have any future plans involving them, would you like to work with them when you’re done with your study?
Besides the questions, realize that this interview is just a conversation between you and some grown-up people. The main goal (for them) is to know if you are good enough and will fit in the companies ‘culture’. And for you, well, you have to make up your own plans/reasons why you want/need that internship.

KABLAM

Well I better get back to studying because.. eh.. hmm.. I’ll just open my book and stare at it.