Statistics professor Steve Bieber didn’t always plan to work in statistics, but after many years of schooling, a war and a joke taken too seriously, he found his passion in teaching statistics at the University of Wyoming.
Joining the University over 40 years ago in 1979, Bieber came to Laramie after earning his master’s in statistics and psychology and his doctorate in quantitative psychology at the University of California-Berkeley.
“I’ve enjoyed it here, I’ve stayed here, I like it here and I still like it here,” Bieber said. “When I plan on retiring, I’ll still stay here and still work within the University.”
Before taking a position at UW, Bieber served in the Vietnam war for three years. After returning to the U.S. he earned his doctorate in quantitative psychology, despite not wanting to pursue psychology. He later took a job in Denver, Colorado, predicting underground coal mine fatalities.
After Vietnam, Bieber applied to graduate school to be a social psychologist but was consistently rejected. When he was accepted to study quantitative psychology, Bieber was told by one of his professors that he sends all his students to the stats department for two years of training and then they come back to quantitative psychology.
“Little did I know that he was essentially joking with me,” Bieber said.
Even after he got the joke, Bieber stayed at the stats department for four years and eventually became the last student of well-known Polish mathematical statistician, Jerzy Neyman. Bieber later found out his own father was Neyman’s first student.
“I never wanted to be a statistician,” Bieber said. “I never even applied to be in a stat department, but they gave me degrees because I did all the coursework and took all the tests.”
Being a man of many degrees, it’s only fitting Bieber has written an immense amount of research articles. One article in particular, co-written with a psychologist in 1986, stands out to him.
“It was comparing of three methods that everyone at the time thought were identical,” Bieber said. “I showed how they weren’t and all the nuances of how they were applied and what they meant.”
In the “old days” before internet, he said, when articles were only in books and journals, people had to request a physical copy of them. Three requests for the article quickly turned into over a thousand requests, enabling individuals to have solid information and research to unlock the problems they needed answered.
Seeing evidence of the article’s success, Bieber said, “is so satisfying.”
Bieber’s passion in teaching stems from helping students learn and succeed as he has. He enjoys teaching the “universal language” of statistics and challenging students to understand the discipline from their perspective rather than his own.
“I’ve never encountered a student who wanted to learn that couldn’t learn and couldn’t succeed,” Bieber said.
Outside of his profession, Bieber enjoys being married to his wife of 50 years and staying as active as he possibly can. He has been involved with a variety of sports and is currently into extreme obstacle course racing, which he does with his two daughters. He will be traveling to Sparta, Greece this year to compete in the world championship Spartan Race.
With Bieber, there are no impossibilities. He’s never had a defined path in life but continues to be grateful for the opportunities he’s encountered and will experience in the future.
