I think that the way that statistics is used in Political Science is more important than how I originally thought throughout my experiences in other IS classes. For instance, when I took IS-230 during my sophomore year here at VMI I never paid much attention to the charts and the data because none of it made any sense to me. I would be able to tell certain things here and there, but I never really stopped to consider what the numbers meant to what the author was saying. This, in turn, I feel, left me open to missing a lot of data that would have been useful to my analysis of that reading. However, after taking this class I know that I have a certain level of understanding that will be useful to my future in reading political studies and papers. More relevant to my current situation is the literature review and methods critique that I have to write for this IS-301 class. The understanding that I have of the data that is commonly used in these studies will be useful by helping to understand what the authors are saying in order for me to write that literature review. Without this knowledge, I wouldn’t really be able to write anything at all (or at least not understand at all what I was talking about). I have never really been a fan of learning about these types of things from other classes like Comparative Politics or International Relations, but I feel that when it was my main goal to learn about it, it somehow became different to me. This helped me to enjoy it just a little bit more than I had in the past and would make it so that understanding these statistics was just a little bit easier. As this semester went on, learning about these concepts such as crosstabs and linear regressions got a little bit easier with every worksheet that we did. I suddenly found myself understanding more and more and eventually not even really having a problem with doing much at all. Towards the beginning of this class, I had no idea what I was doing nor did I have any experience in studying statistics, and was rather nervous to get into it seeing as SPSS looked like a much more complicated Microsoft Excel. I didn’t really know what to expect, but as I said earlier it only kept getting easier. I am glad that I’ve had this experience and that moving forward in my Political Science career I will have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the statistics that authors use.