I haven’t become a statistics expert in my own mind, but I’m certainly the most knowledgeable of the people I work with. It helps that I use GraphPad Prism, a spectacular graphing and statistics program that clearly explains my choices and only requires a few intuitive button presses to perform a test.

My PhD thesis contains a lot of statistics work performed by collaborators, so writing and really really understanding that has increased my statistical fluency to a large extent.

Stats are very powerful – and well worth understanding. Don’t give up! Find a friendly statistician who doesn’t mind answering a few questions as you learn. One of the collaborators on my PhD project is the world’s coolest statistician and I relished the times when I was able to chat with him about techniques (and commiserate about other parts of the project).