For years I thought I had to do it the way the big boys do, studying university text books and referencing papers in the field and putting a bunch of mathematical notation in my designs and emails. While also knowing all the foundations underneath. Unsurprisingly, that didn't really go anywhere, except hours lost fiddling with Word's equation editor (or worse, Latex).
What did help me was reading a few (really a few - just 2 or 3) simple, applied books; a 'statistics for dummies' (literally, the 'for dummies' book), a textbook used in undergrad business courses ('<something something> business analytics' I think?) and a book that applied all the stats to the field I was working on at the time (transportation modeling). Just being able to apply a linear regression (as in, actually being able to estimate the parameter on a single regressor in a simple data set) got me much further than all the times I thought 'whoops, getting into optimization now, better put this aside and first get a graduate level understanding of linear algebra'. And in a week instead of 2 years, too - quite important to keep your motivation up when you're not a full time student any more.
So while the above is not 'advice', it is my personal experience that when learning applied maths at a later age, it was better for me to focus on application and taking shortcuts even if that meant not fully knowing or understanding what was happening underneath - as intellectually unsatisfying and 'dirty' that felt at the time.
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For years I thought I had to do it the way the big boys do, studying university text books and referencing papers in the field and putting a bunch of mathematical notation in my designs and emails. While also knowing all the foundations underneath. Unsurprisingly, that didn't really go anywhere, except hours lost fiddling with Word's equation editor (or worse, Latex).
What did help me was reading a few (really a few - just 2 or 3) simple, applied books; a 'statistics for dummies' (literally, the 'for dummies' book), a textbook used in undergrad business courses ('<something something> business analytics' I think?) and a book that applied all the stats to the field I was working on at the time (transportation modeling). Just being able to apply a linear regression (as in, actually being able to estimate the parameter on a single regressor in a simple data set) got me much further than all the times I thought 'whoops, getting into optimization now, better put this aside and first get a graduate level understanding of linear algebra'. And in a week instead of 2 years, too - quite important to keep your motivation up when you're not a full time student any more.
So while the above is not 'advice', it is my personal experience that when learning applied maths at a later age, it was better for me to focus on application and taking shortcuts even if that meant not fully knowing or understanding what was happening underneath - as intellectually unsatisfying and 'dirty' that felt at the time.