Yusuf Akinpelu
Data has been said to be where the world’s future treasure is locked, and only those who know how to manipulate it would own the key to unlock this treasure.
This submission was made on Tuesday by Mr Gbolahan Adedoyin during a programme tagged A Day with a Statistician.
While delivering his lecture, Mr Gbolahan emphasized the need to harness the power in data mining and its interpretation. Doing this, he said, would help every stakeholders in making proper planning and decision making.
“Data make you to plan for all sector. With it, the government too would be able to formulate good policies. With data, not only can you look back, you can also look into the future,” he said.
He went further by sensitizing the students on the requirement for after school life. Horning of writing and speaking skills, mentoring, reading, technology skills and internship were the areas he charged the students to improve upon.
He stressed the need for students to discover themselves through personal growth, planning, training, motivation, creativity and learning.
He added that students should be knowledge thirsty. He advised that, rather than use the internet for frivolous ventures, it should be used to acquire more knowledge.
“Use your data,” he said, referring to internet data, “to train yourself. Use your data to acquire useful knowledge.”
Mr Gbolahan equally touched on career goal setting. He explained that the attitude students develop while been students would be what they would exhibit when they launch a career.
He said: “Whatever you put in your self now is what you would become. Your profession is your job. Your career is your endpoint. What sustain your career are vision, skill and education. You may lose your profession but your career remains with you for life.”
To achieve these goals, the Don affirmed, students need to build healthy networks, have a mentor and build a personal relationship with them.
“There is also need for you to get a mentor, someone who has been there before, someone who has the battle scars and survived, someone who is in a peripheral position.
“It doesn’t matter the ethnicity, gender or age. It is until you discover that person your career cannot move forward.”
A day with a Statistician is a weekly programme organized by the University of Ibadan Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (UI–LISA), a unit in the Department of Statistics, University of Ibadan.
LISA is a 2020 global initiative whose vision is to see that 20 statistical laboratories are established across the world in order to provide guidance to the use of statistics by bringing producers and users of statistics to a closer union.
