Abstract:
This blog explores my relationship with maths—why I never considered myself a “maths person” (and still don’t!), how I started seeing its real-world applications, and what ultimately led me to pursue statistics. Despite ongoing struggles, imposter syndrome, and frequent moments of questioning my life choices, I’ve come to appreciate maths in different ways.
Body:
I’ve always done okay at maths. In school, I got good grades, picked up concepts quickly, and never really struggled with it. But did I love maths? Not really. I saw it as just another subject—one that I was good at but never excited about. I didn’t hate it, but I definitely wasn’t the type to do extra problems for fun. A big part of that was because I never felt like I could apply most of the maths I learned in class to real life. And as someone who’s motivated by practical applications, memorising formulas just to pass an exam never really sparked my interest.
Then, somehow, maths found me anyway—when I got into gacha games. If you’re into gacha or even the blind boxes that have become so popular in recent years, you might relate to the pain. You roll for a rare character or item, hoping for that lucky pull, and instead, you get the same useless duplicate five times in a row. At some point, I started wondering: What were my actual chances? Are the probabilities for a rare pull really as written? Am I just unlucky? Or am I getting scammed?
That’s when I realised, probability was no longer just some maths concept in class. It was shaping my entire gaming experience. And it wasn’t just games. The more I paid attention, the more I saw statistics everywhere—from predicting the weather, to the odds of winning the lottery, and how insurance costs are calculated. Then, COVID-19 hit, and suddenly, statistics dictated so much of our daily lives: infection rates, vaccine effectiveness, mortality rates. It was impossible to ignore its impact.
That’s how, despite never being particularly into maths, I ended up pursuing statistics. It felt useful and practical, and way more interesting than the theoretical maths I never cared much for in class. (Though I do appreciate it—if you’re someone who loves pure maths, hats off to you!)
But the thing is, even now, after choosing this path, I still don’t think of myself as a “maths person.” I don’t excel at maths the way some of my peers do, and though I sometimes find it interesting, I’m not particularly passionate about it. That’s why joining the AMSI SRS program gave me major imposter syndrome. Some topics in maths feel impossible to understand, especially the abstract ones, and I run into concepts that make me seriously question my life choices more often than I’d like. There are times when I struggle with a seemingly simple problem for hours, wondering if this was really what I signed up for.
And yet, I stuck with it. Because even though maths still frustrates me sometimes, I can’t deny that it’s everywhere, explaining things I never even thought about before, which is pretty cool! And despite my complaints, there’s something satisfying about solving a problem that seemed impossible at first, or finally wrapping my head around a concept that was initially so alien.
So, will I ever be a true “maths person”? Probably not. But for now, I’ll keep solving problems and rolling the dice on pursuing maths—even if I complain about it along the way.
Bernice Laitly
The University of New South Wales
