Nerdify is hearing bells ringing around the country again as students go back to schools and colleges.

This can be an exciting time of year, but sometimes a stressful and overwhelming one too. That’s why our Personal Nerds have compiled some awesome tips for heading back to your studies stress-free!

And don’t forget, if you need extra support, Nerdify is always standing by and only a message away!

1. Have your timetable and agenda ready!

Nothing will put a downer on your first day back at a college like turning up and having no idea where you’re supposed to go and at what time a certain class starts. Homework, lessons, extra activities and different events can be quite overwhelming so make sure you have a timetable that’s regularly updated and properly plans your activities. Managing your time is critical to your happiness and academic success! By the way, you can ask Nerdify folks to remind you about important stuff like homework, exams, workshops.

2. Be prepared with the right supplies and books.

If your school or college doesn’t supply enough of the right materials (let’s face it, do they ever?) then make sure you’re well-equipped for your first day back. Having the right supplies can not only help you to be more prepared and organized but stationary is also fun! Well, we think so at least. Also, nobody likes the person in their class who is always asking to borrow a pen!

3. Focus on the academic tasks first!

Everyone can slip into procrastination mode and sometimes prioritize their social activities and hobbies over their studies. But this can have stressful repercussions if we allow it to happen too often, especially in the first few weeks of term when getting ahead and staying ahead is important. Remember, if you need extra help so you can spend more time on fun activities then Nerdify is standing by to help you out with any of your tasks and assignments!

4. Write down your academic goals for the term or year.

As with everything in life, it’s so important to set yourself tangible goals and milestones. We all need something to strive towards, otherwise, it can often feel like our endless work has no real destination or result. Writing down your goals will allow you to properly manage your time and plan your strategy for reaching them. To do lists have been proven to be a powerful driving, motivating force!

5. Learn what type of learner you are!

If you have high expectations for yourself during this academic term (and why shouldn’t you!) it could be really important for you to work out what kind of learner you are. And we don’t mean whether you’re a slow learner or a fast one, or anything like that. But how do you better learn? What’s your process? Maybe you’re more auditory and need music and speeches. Perhaps you’re more of a visual learner that needs pictures and writing or maybe you’re vocal and need to talk about subjects and write notes to better retain the information.

And there we have it: 5 top tips from our Personal Nerds on how to get the most out of your first days and weeks back at school. Don’t forget to drop us a message if you need extra advice or support!

 

 

It’s been a hell of a year for Nerdify. We’ve helped a record number of students this year and we’ve doubled in size (hooray!). But the New Year is on the horizon… Which brings us to the question of how we can celebrate it? Certainly, most of us will be celebrating it with our friends and family, but what if you want to do something special this year?
We’ve created a list of five creative ways how you can celebrate this New Year, check it out, maybe there’s something in this list that you may wanna try 😉

1. Visit real Santa

That means going to Finland. Yes, that’s not exactly a half an hour ride from your house, but bear with me, there are lots of awesome things you can do once you get there.

Finland has a fantastic national travel-website that has already collected all the main adventures Finland is famous about:

* You can go on a husky ride through the snowy forest (one of our Nerds actually did that – said it’s super cold, so make sure you bring warm clothes and some vodka with you. You gonna need it).
* You can check out beautiful auroras in the night sky (those are free of charge, thank you solar winds, yay!)
* You can go Gold panning (this is a perfect activity for kids – they get to collect their own GOLD, how cool is that?!).
* Cruise on an Icebreaker (and see real polar bears on little icebergs, oh… so cute 🙂
* And, obviously – see the real Santa Claus (that’s what New Year is all about, right?)
And much more actually. In Finland, you truly feel special during the New Year. You indeed think that miracles can happen during this special night, it’s absolutely magical.

2. Celebrate New Year following traditions from another country.

Just a few examples for you, of the crazy shenanigans people do across the world during the New Years Eve:

* In Burma people splash buckets of water on each other to “start New Year with a clean soul”. They certainly can do that in Burma, because it is quite hot during the New Year. I suspect that wouldn’t really work somewhere in Canada, now would it? 😉
* In Russia, people write their wishes on a piece of paper, then set it on fire in a glass. When only ashes remain – they pour champagne into the glass and drink it “bottoms up” before midnight. That way your wish will come true in the following year. For additional tips on how to “Party Like a Russian” we suggest you check out the Robbie Williams video-guide.
* In Italy, Argentina and Bolivia it is a common tradition to wear colorful underwear. It is believed that it will bring luck, love and prosperity to the one who’s wearing either red, pink or yellow underwear 🙂 What can we say, those folks are definitely not boring 🙂
* In South Africa and Peru, people tend to get more violent. In Johannesburg, South Africa, it is common to throw old appliances out of the window. That way locals “step into the new year leaving old things behind”. While in Peru it is common to have a fist fight with a person you have a grudge on. That way you can “wipe the slate clean” before the New Year.

Just make sure none of these local traditions get you in jail. As far as we can tell, no country has a tradition celebrating New Year’s Eve in jail 🙂

3. Be real Santa Claus.

Why not create some miracles yourself? You can be the master of the night by putting on a Santa Claus costume and grabbing a red bag full of goodies. Better still – gather a group of like-minded crazy people who will do a flash mob of Santas in the center of the city. You can build a huge snowman and give away presents and sweets to passers-by or baking a cookie that’s gonna crush the Guinness world record. Let your imagination go wild!

4. Outdoors

Being outdoors on the New Year’s Eve is also exciting. Imagine skiing in the mountains during the night.. Isn’t it magical? Alternatively, you can go full bananas and go camping in the forest. Greeting the New Year under the stars with a glass of champagne and a loved one. Romantic… but also quite chilly so make sure you have a heating pad with you or something. Getting a cold is not part of the plan here!

5. Do some charity-work

New Year is also a great time to think about those who are less fortunate than we are. What kind of a miracle would it be, if you could dress as a Santa and visit a local orphanage and give presents or sweets to the ones in need. Donate to the homeless shelter. Or visit a local animal shelter and adopt a puppy.

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Remember, New Year is the time of miracles. It’s the only time when the whole world is celebrating, so why not do something special this time? 😉

Nerdify will be back with you next year to continue doing what it does best – helping students achieve their academic goals all across the world. Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to you!

We’ve got a feedback story from our grateful customer who decided to share his success story and help students who struggle with the chi-squared test.

This article contains a full and really simple guide to solving chi-square. To keep his identity anonymous, we’ve changed his name.

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I’m Donald and this is my story about conquering chi-square. Einstein was completely right saying that, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

If you’re currently struggling with the chi-square test, I’ll answer all — and I mean all — your questions about this tricky statistical method in really easy to understand terms!

I’ve adapted this article from the “Methodology” section of my paper. You are welcome to use it to understand how the methodology of your own homework should work.

What is the Chi-Square Test and Where to Use It?

The first time I had to use chi-square was when I was at the 4th year of my undergraduate program at Pittsburgh University School of Nursing. I planned to prove that googling about mental health issues can cause anxiety and negative emotions.

Thus, the topic of my paper was “How reading of online resources about mental health issues impacts patients’ mental and emotional state”.

I surveyed 100 patients. I asked them how often they read about health issues, and whether such a guilty pleasure triggers their anxiety. Then, I recorded their answers on a table.  

All I needed was to find the right statistical test. I looked through a short chi-square guide online and it totally triggered my math anxiety.

You know, I felt that I’m the dumbest person in the world. Thankfully, I did not give up and continued.

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At the end of the day, Donald resolves his case — being mentored by a professional Nerd.

Let Nerdify find your perfect academic match using AI! 🤖

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❓ What is the Chi-Square Test?

First things first, I got to know my enemy. Chi-square test is a common statistical method used to determine whether two things (in statistics they are called variables) are somehow related.

❓ How to find out whether variables are related? If one variable somehow changes, and another immediately changes in response, it means that they are related.

This is actually very simple to understand once you put the concept of chi-square in the context of a real example.

In my case, patients would be reading about health issues online and experience anxiety. If they feel bad after browsing horrifying symptoms of mental illnesses on WedMD, that means these variables are related.

To make sure that the chi-square method suits your particular research, check these criteria:

1. You need to analyze numerical results — specifically, the numbers of times you’ve observed something happening, or how many people gave the same response.
2. Variables are categorical — variables should belong to specific groups. For instance, respondents in surveys can be categorized by gender, age, political views, etc.
3. There are two individual variables (e.g. how frequently people google online about mental illnesses (very frequently or rarely) and the effect of their googling (increased anxiety or no negative emotions)
4. You only need a “yes” or “no” answer – chi-square can only tell if two variables influence each other. It never tells how strong the influence is and when or why it occurs.

Chi-square is used pretty much anywhere because it is a simple, suitable for any sample size, and cheap way to test whether two variables are related. For instance:

 

• In healthcare: is anxiety associated with online research about health issues?
• In sociology: is crime rate related to the poverty level in a specific region?
• In marketing: do sales depend on the region where products are sold?
• In politics: does voter turnout depend on voter age?

Given all this info, I decided that chi-square was exactly what I needed for my research. But how to convert my data into a table and then get all the calculations done right? After 5 days of trial and error, all I had was only errors and I got stuck.

Why Chi-Square Test is Mistakenly Thought to be Difficult?

You’d think that the good old Google knows everything, but nope. Page after page of the search results, I saw the same explanations by-the-book, which were all Greek to me. Without statistical education, I got the theoretical part but was completely lost when it came to practice.

Then a friend of mine recommended me Nerdify. Nerdify connected me with a perfect Nerd — a Master in Medical Statistics and finally, I knew I was going somewhere!

A detailed explanation from the Nerd on how chi-square works and how I should use it — it was all that I needed to nail my super difficult paper.

Why was chi-square so difficult for me? As my Nerd said, it happens with all the students for the following reasons:

• Extremely complex definitions and explanations that make chi-square seem very entangled and confuse students
• Without illustrative examples, complex formulas are overwhelming for anyone who does not have a fancy for math.
• Lack of time teachers can devote to explaining every topic — students often have no one to ask for an extra explanation
• Lack of knowledge due to that your major doesn’t have anything to do with statistics. As a student nurse, I didn’t have any background in studying statistics at all.
  

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  Want a Personal Nerd to step in and make your test easier?

• Explain formulas?
• Provide real-life examples?
• Mentor customization of statistical methods to your project?

 📲 Message Nerdify to get help!

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If you’re struggling just as I did, for whatever reason, I’ve got a perfect step-by-step guide to chi-square that you can use!

Really Simple Step-by-Step Chi-Square Guide

Right off the bat, you should know that it’s totally acceptable for non-statistics students to skip doing all the calculations manually and use online chi-square test calculators.

However, my college professor required all the chi-square formulas explained in the paper. Thus, if you’ll use chi-square, you need to understand this method to interpret the results correctly.

▶ Formula Explained

When you see this abomination of a formula, you probably think it’s extremely complex:

where

• χ2 — value of chi square
• Σ — sign of sum, means the total amount of elements in a sequence
• O — observed value of a variable, or the numbers you already have from observations or task description
• E — expected value of variables you need to calculate yourself; they represent how the variables would be distributed if there would be NO relationship between the variables

Even if you do all the calculations using MS Excel or SPSS, you still need to know where to put which number!

In sections below, you fill find out more about where to find these numbers.

Now it’s time for the best part — calculations!

 

0️⃣ My Case ➕ Sample Size

In my research, I surveyed 100 patients. I asked them how often they read about health issues, and whether such a guilty pleasure triggers their anxiety

• So there were two categories of patients: those who frequently research health issues and those who rarely research them
• There were also two options of their emotional response: increased anxiety and no changes  

Right now, I know my sample size — the number of observations. How many people responded to the survey? How many times you’ve seen something happening during the experiment or study?

In my case, sample equaled 100 — the number of people who participated in the survey.

 

1️⃣ Creating a Chi-Square Table

Using this data, I created this contingency table:

❓ Contingency tables present observations in matrix format — rows and columns, just like the table above. This type of tables is very commonly used in statistics, especially because it demonstrates how two variables are connected.

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	Increased anxiety	No changes	Total
Frequently research
Rarely research
Total

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2️⃣ Choosing Statistical Significance

If you’re writing a paper using the chi-square method, chances are that the level of statistical significance isn’t given. Where do you get it? You choose it yourself!

❓ Statistical significance — is the likelihood of that the relationship between two or more variables is accidental and the results of the observation are caused by something else than just chance.

For instance, if a patient gets anxiety every time he does online research about health issues, then statistically the probability of getting anxiety, aka level of confidence is 100%, or 1.

If a patient gets anxiety in 9 times out of 10, then we can confidently state that the probability here is 90%, or 0.9.

The most typical levels of significance are 0.05 and 0.01 — both are 100% safe to use in your paper. I chose 0.01 because the lower the value, the more significant results you’ll get — lower significance implies a lower risk of error.

Why do we need the level of significance? My Nerd had a good metaphor to explain it. Imagine that you have to climb up a ladder that has 100 steps. The more steps are missing, the higher the risk that you’ll fall. That’s why we set a very low level of significance — to make sure that calculations are correct!

 

3️⃣ State your Hypotheses

The hypothesis is a fancy word that confuses many students, but in reality, the hypothesis is just an assumption that you have. In chi-square, you’ll need 2 of them.

• Null hypothesis (H0)– usually states that the results of the observations could result purely from chance and the variables are independent — if one of them changes, another one stays the same and doesn’t react to the changes in the first one.

My H0 would say that getting anxiety isn’t connected with researching health issues online.

• Alternative hypothesis (H1)  states that the sample observations result not from a random cause, but from a specific cause and the variables are dependent in some way.

That is, my H1 says that patients really do get anxiety and experience negative feelings after researching health issues online.

4️⃣ Fill in Observed Values

Here just enter all the observed values into the table:

❓ Observed value — what actually happened or how many times you’ve seen something occur. For instance, how many respondents out of 100 admitted to frequently research online about mental issues and get anxiety from it

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	Increased anxiety	No change	Total
Frequently research	36	9	45
Rarely research	24	31	55
Total	60	40	100

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5️⃣ Calculate Expected Value

Here we calculate values that would be observed in case if there would be no relationship between researching health issues and experiencing negative emotions.

❓ Expected value — it’s calculated by the formula below and show what would happen if the variables were absolutely independent — wouldn’t affect each other at all.

where

• E — expected value
• Mr — row total for the cell you’re calculating an expected value for
• Mc — column total for that cell
• n — sample size
  

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	Increased anxiety	No change	Total
Frequently research	27	18	45
Rarely research	33	22	55
Total	60	40	100

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• Expected value for “frequently research, increased anxiety” E=45*60/100=27
• Expected value for “only rarely research, increased anxiety” E=55*60/100=33
• Expected value for “frequently research, no negative emotions” E=45*40/100=18
• Expected value for“only rarely research, no negative emotions” E=55*40/100=22

 

6️⃣ Calculate Chi-Square Using the Formula

Once again, you can use online calculators, but this how it’s done in practice (aka the hard way):

 

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Not ready yet to move further with chi-square test?

Find your Nerd to ease your pain. In anything. Unless it’s legal. 😎

 🧐 Get Connected to a Personal Nerd!

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7️⃣ Calculate Degrees of Freedom and Critical Value

Now that we got chi-square calculation done, let’s calculate the degrees of freedom

❓ Degrees of freedom (df) — the number of independent variables that went into the calculation.

Just think of those promotions “buy 2 — get 1 for free!” — you’re free to choose several things, but +1 product is always set by the promotion. Degrees of freedom, however, subtract 1 from both your rows and columns.

You need to use a chi-square distribution table and find your critical value at the intersection of the degrees of freedom (df=1) and the level of significance (α=0.01):

So, our critical value is 6.63. This value is smaller than our χ2 =13.63 Therefore, in our chi-square test example, researching about health issues online and getting anxiety or negative emotions are related.

We don’t know how much they are related, because chi-square doesn’t answer this question. But we definitely know that they are somehow related.👌

Chi-Square Calculators — the Easy Way

Even if you need to do all the difficult calculations by yourself, these calculators are awesome to verify your results. Or, if you’re lucky, online calculators are all you’ll need to use to calculate chi-square!

1. Social Science Statistics Calculator — easy to use chi-square calculator that can calculate up to 5 rows and 5 columns. You can enter category names, fill in the data, and get the result in a flash.
2. Kent University SPSS Guide for Chi-Square — if you have SPSS, you can consider your chi-square test pretty much already done. This guide will help you learn how to import chi-square tables and graphs into the SPSS and get the task solved. Many colleges and universities use SPSS as their default tool, and your professor may ask you to show your SPSS datasheet.
3. Chi-Square Calculator — another extremely simple online chi-squared test calculator. All you need to do is enter the observed values and you’ll get degrees of freedom and chi-square ready.

How Can You Nail Chi-Square: My Pro Tips

If anyone told me I would be able to do it just a week before connecting with a Nerd, I’d never believed it. It was simple and logical explanations from my Nerd that helped me completely nail chi-square test and do all the calculations by myself.

Now, I understand each step of chi-square and interpret results correctly. For me, it was crucial that a professional, with a background in studying and applying statistics in practice, would explain everything to me in human language, not math language.

And now a few tips for you to cut corners if you’re dealing with chi-square:

• Keep in mind that chi-square isn’t rocket science — it is doable and actually very easy if you have a really simple and detailed guideline
• The number of rows and columns can vary and your table can be much larger than mine, however, the principle remains the same — you’ll just need to do more arithmetic
• When calculating the expected value, you’ll most likely get fractions, which can confuse you, especially if you’re calculating the number of people in each category. Don’t bother about it — these calculations are intended for further calculation of chi-square

That’s all I wanted to share in my feedback story today. Hopefully, it will help you nail chi-square and get the grade you deserve! Chi-square isn’t as difficult as it may seem at first, so go ahead and break a lance!

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Of course, you can make your own success story too!

Nerdify is an AI-powered platform to quickly connect with the experience of 1000s of Personal Nerds

✨Give a try right now!

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