What advice do you have for this student who’s in his first year of college and interested in both statistics and political science?

Joey Jennings writes: I’m a first-year statistics major and wanted to reach out because statistics and political science were my two main options when choosing a major, and I’m still considering law school down the line. I’m very interested in how statistical thinking intersects with politics, public policy, and legal reasoning, and your career seems to embody that combination. I was hoping to ask whether you have any general advice for a student early in college who is trying to keep these paths open and build a strong foundation. My response: I think I’m too old and too privileged to offer much useful advice to a young student just starting out. My own experience is that I always loved math but I didn’t want to do pure math–it just seemed pointless to try to prove theorems, knowing that there would be other mathematicians who were better than me, proving better theorems–, I studied physics, but then I took some classes in probability and statistics and the subject really grooved…