Issue #35: My Secret Weapon

Mar 02, 2025

🚨 NEW VIDEO DROPS

I also started a fast format for teaching how to implement statistical models in code. The first one was 2-Minute Kaplan-Meier Curves in R.

📺 What’s coming up?

Code for proportional hazards models; code for bayesian linear regression; “real world evidence”

📰 TL;DR

If you’re a student, take advantage of your school library’s VPN!!! It will give you access to textbooks and papers that the general population doesn’t have access to.

In this issue…

I wanted to talk about unfair advantages. In building a YouTube channel, one of the pieces of advice you’ll hear is that you should lean into the characteristics that make you or your situation unique. Compared to starting in an area where you’re a noob, it’s much easier to get established.

I certainly thought of this when I started. From my perspective, here are some of Very Normal’s:

Pursuing a Ph.D gives me an air of authority (deserved or not
I knew how to edit video well before I started the channel
Being a student gives me so much free time to do all this video stuff

But from my perspective, all of these unfair advantages pale in comparison to one last one:

My school’s VPN.

If I use my school’s VPN, I get free access to almost any textbook or research manuscript I want. Most of the time, I can download these resources without any expiration date.

From the perspective of a Ph.D student, this seems like an obvious resource. I need to read papers to inform my own research. But from the perspective of a statistics Youtuber, it’s a bevy of resources that other channels may not have access to.

I used my school’s VPN extensively in doing some research for the maximum likelihood video — usually in the form of statistical history papers buried in statistics journals.

Unfortunately, I think I’ll be losing access to my school library VPN when I graduate this June. I’m not sure if there are alternatives, but it’s something that I’ve been trying to figure out in the background. I’m even considering searching for jobs that might also have access to similar VPNs.

While I’ll be losing access, I want to encourage my readers to take advantage of theirs (if they have access to one). I wish I had known how useful my school’s VPN was when I was an undergraduate and a Masters student. It would have saved my poor ass a good amount of money on textbooks.

Even if you’re not using it for textbooks for your class, you can still use it to download textbooks in areas that you want to learn more about. One lesson I’ve learned in my Ph.D is that you need to take control of your own learning; your department courses may not be enough to give you a competitive edge in job applications.

As such, textbooks are an invaluable asset. My advisor told me to download as many textbooks as I could before my access is revoked. If you have access to one, I implore you to use the hell out of it too.

See you in the next one.

Footnotes

🧐 What am I enjoying right now?

Severance, Season 2 right now is amazing. Episode 7 was crazy.
I’ve also been listening to The Minimalist Entrepeneur by Sahil Lavingia. Business is not something you learn in a Ph.D, so it’s something I read about on the side. So far, it’s been full of interesting ideas that I hope to implement in the future.

📦 Other stuff of mine

I wrote guided solutions to problems to Andrew Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis. It’s for advanced self-learners teaching themselves Bayesian statistics
You can support me on Ko-fi! YouTube and Substack are by far the best (and easiest) ways to support me, but if you feel like going the extra mile, this would be the place. It is always appreciated!