As a doctor and physician attending medical conferences on new innovations in medicine and healthcare protocols, you come to many realizations as you watch different scientific research presentations given by Egyptians and foreigners with completely different approaches to research and work focus.
For a person who spent most of his life avoiding this, I hate to say it, but I’m beginning to realize that in order to achieve any proper progress in most work fields in Egypt, we need to incorporate a decent course in statistics at the secondary school level before students begin into college.
Statistics is something of paramount importance in every field of life, work and studies. If you’re a student planning to begin a career in the life sciences, you need to understand statistics and biostatistics as you’ll later need them to understand and possibly conduct trials and experimentation. They will also enable you to translate such numbers and figures in statistical representation.
Without proper statistics in graduation papers, such as master’s degree and PhD thesis preparations, a study may be found redundant and considered simply theoretical.
Statistics bring the thesis to life and make whatever result reached applicable. Without a good knowledge of this field, the potential of any research or proper scientific study will be dwarfed and it is likely that the work will not be attempted.
If you’re in another field, you’ll also need statistics. Whether it is business, economics or accounting, whether it is journalism, political studies or even sports, statistics is always needed to understand the big picture and the repercussions and impact of any action, decision or move. Even in architecture, arts or in simply understanding the world around us and in our day-to-day dealings, activities or maintenance of home finances, statistics is of huge significance.
Furthermore, there are a lot of useless “fillings” in the syllabi incorporated in our country’s high school material. These so-called “fillings” need to be removed and substituted by a mandatory summer program for the two-to-three-year period to introduce the students to what is a clinical trial as well as the basics of research, its planning, data collection, and analysis. Students should also be taught how to be creative with the research protocols.
In doing this, I don’t mean research as in looking up older papers and creating a summary but rather conducting full trials, starting from scratch and actually doing something new and innovative. Maybe, if we get youth invested into those fields at an early age as well as open up the fields of experimentation with a younger, newer approach, we may have different conditions in the next 15-20 years. By then, we may have results and breakthroughs in different fields and be able to say we actually achieved something that is new and of valuable impact on science, the region and the world. We would be able to say that we have not come up with a summary of what others have done before, but that we have made our very own contribution.
To sum up, we need to learn statistics and statistical analysis at an early age and this should be taught to each and every school student. Research protocols and constructs should be introduced early in high schools and the youth should be involved in and motivated to enter experimentation and trials from a young age. The field should be polished to be more attractive to work in.
It is only through these tools that as a nation and as a population we may start generating the most expensive currency of our time to trade with and be considered among the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world, namely science and knowledge.
By: Dr. Mahmoud Tareq Bashir
Picture designed by: Mahmoud Mansi & Ahmed Mohamed Hassan
Edited by: Nada Adel Sobhi