I took only one statistics course during my undergrad. It was titled “Intro to statistics for biological science”. I thought it would be a very applied and interesting class. Instead, it was a series of lectures which presented formulas and statistical techniques that we were told were important. Homework involved using this techniques in often extremely narrow contexts. The problems were “applied”, because they used data from biological systems (e.g. blood pressure, population size). However, we were never asked interesting biological questions. The statistics were first, biology was second. This makes some sense, because it was a statistics course, but the biology could’ve been used to motivate the statistics. Through the course I became increasingly disinterested in statistics and I never took another course. Years later I am using statistics in my research, because it is what the ecological questions I am interested in require.
In retrospective, I wish the professor used the biological questions to motivate the statistical techniques we were learning. It is far more interesting (for biologists) to ask what this drug will do instead of what data set and question is a t-test appropriate for? In addition, I felt many of the problems we worked on were narrowly focused. Specifically, at the end of the course it was hard to take what you had learned in order to apply it to a novel data set. If we worked with a data set and asked questions about it (and learned the necessary tools to answer those questions) we would have learned how statistics is actually applied in the field. Understanding how to apply statistical techniques, and learn new tools when need be, is much more valuable than learning specific techniques that are appropriate in only contrived, narrow situations.