Nerd ALERT

This is how much of a geek I am:

Today in research class we were fed a plethora of details and I was literally in my chair with knees bent, feet tucked under my butt. You know, how kids sit when they're excited. I was not too far from holding my raised hand up with my other arm, stammering, "Ooh ooh ooh! Me! Pick me!"

Well after some generic lecture, with some minimal Power Point slides, our professor took us into PAWS (formerly SPSS--a statistical software program) and was showing us around through the nuances of statistical calculation.

People, now when I say "nuances," I mean nuances.

These were things like, "Now if we want to include all data that coders coded as grayscale/black&white/duotone instead of full color, we select this here, and this here, and this here...And if we want a bar chart we do this...And if we want to exclude responses from survey participants who refused to answer the question or answered 'don't know/unsure,' we make sure we check this button, and we want to uncheck this box, and voila!"

Followed by,

"Uh oh. It seems we have an outlier. We've gotta go find it by inspecting our data set."

Bailey sits in her seat, thinking excitedly, "Yes! Let's find it! Data entry mistake!" Almost clapping her hands.

Everyone else in the class sits overwhelmed, bored, or confused (not to say my classmates aren't competent--these are some smart peeps, I just doubt they're as nerdily excited about survey data as I am. I will say that I think at this point my neighbor Kelsey seemed a tad excited herself).

So throughout all this I kept giggling at the subtle research jokes that were being made by our professor! When our professor would laugh, I would laugh. I mean, like our TA would laugh at something our professor said, and he's a Ph.D. student, and our prof. has her Ph.D., and then there's crazy Bailey in the back row laughing with them!

Not to indicate that being chummy with your teachers is silly. People. I love teachers, and I hope you do too.

It gets worse.

I cracked my own joke.

So when we first got to class this morning, we got our recent pop quizzes back (which Bailey the nerd did not do well on, because she hasn't been doing her readings--being a nerd doesn't equate with star student), and Dayne laughed at himself and showed us his, saying, "I spelled my name wrong!"

He left off the last letter of his last name. Maybe he's a closet nerd, and he rushed through the name writing to get right to the quiz he was so excited to take. I'll have to ask him.

So then when our professor was discussing the "don't know" option as a survey response, I whispered to Dayne, across Kelsey who was between us, "Dayne, you might need a 'don't know' option on the name portion of your survey."

He smirked.

Kelsey, who's not mean, and may have been serious when she said this, told me, "Good one, Bailey."

That's right, I'm awesome.