• Question: do you have to do a lot of maths

    Asked by herd535muns6 to SamG, Rebecca R, christinaschoettler, bengreen1 on 17 Oct 2025.
    • Photo: Rebecca Randhawa

      Rebecca Randhawa answered on 17 Oct 2025:

      In my day to day job as a medical statistician, I must think mathematically and scientifically in everything I do- but that doesn’t mean that I spend all day “doing maths”! I attend meetings to discuss how best to collect patient data, talk to doctors about issues with our data, e.g. missing data or data entered incorrectly, plan how we will do our analyses, I do computer coding, review tables and graphs- it’s extremely varied! Some days I spend a lot of time looking at numbers, but other days I don’t do a lot of maths at all!

Comments

  • Photo: melissau

    melissau commented on :

    As a vet I would typically only do straightforward maths such as calculating the dose of medicine needed to treat an animal (based on the weight of the animal, the amount of drug needed for the disease over a given number of days and the quantity of drug in each tablet or each ml of liquid if it’s for an injection). Other than that, there’s not much complicated maths in daily work.
    When I’m working as a researcher I might use statistical tests to analyse the data I’m collecting to answer a question – this may be straightforward statistics or something more complicated, depending on the kind of question and the number of different things which might affect the answer. For example, if I’m trying to understand whether the likelihood of a problem happening is related to the animal’s age, that’s quite a simple question and I could use a simple statistical test. But if I’m trying to understand how it’s affected by the animal’s age, the breed, the environment the animal lives in, the time of year and the place where the animal lives, that needs more complicated statistical analysis.