@Rosemary you didnt dw. the arithmatic is easy, its just very boring

@daylight Yeah, I agree on that point. It's calculus and beyond where things start to get interesting.

@Rosemary i dont wanna do calculus though! i just wanna make graphs and do my animal science

@daylight Then you don't need to do calculus!

@Rosemary my degree requirements say otherwise

@daylight Well, you'll probably need some calculus for making the graphs, but it shouldn't be too complicated calculus. Just a few differential equations.

@daylight That depends on what subfield you go into, too. If you look at population dynamics, there's going to be a significant amount of relatively simple differential equations in there, but if you're doing behavioral studies there would be much less math involved, mostly statistics.

@Rosemary statistics is more intersting, i wanna do conservation biology

@daylight You'll probably need some of both, then. Statistics is actually the one field of mathematics we've not enjoyed at all, honestly!

@Rosemary i like stat because it feels like it actually tells me something meaningful

@daylight We disliked it because we could never understand the derivations, I think. With calculus and differential equations, the derivations are straightforward and make sense to us in a way that statistics never did. What wasn't precise felt hand-wave-y, and what was precise felt too complicated to follow.

@Rosemary this is greek to me

@daylight Basically what I'm saying is that the explanations for why the statistics work always felt either too much of a handwave or completely incomprehensible to us, but the explanations for why calculus works were easy to follow and made intuitive sense. That'll probably be different for different people, of course! And some people may not even care about why it works; we're probably unusual in that we can't really learn things without understanding why things are that way.