statistic

Please forgive me if this post does not fit the focus of this forum - I will move it if there is a better place to ask this. I know this is a long post, but I would be extremely grateful if someone were to read I am an incoming statistics master's student in a top department. I am a long time lurker and I would frequent this forum during the 2021 application season. I would often read profile evaluation posts and post-admission decision posts in which many folks would discuss their research interests and the institutions' strengths/weaknesses in those areas. As someone who is interested in continuing onto a PhD (perhaps in statistics or an adjacent field) I would like to pursue research during my master's program. However, I am ashamed and feel that I would be severely naive in approaching the faculty to work with them because the department is very highly regarded and has extremely influential statisticians, and I do not even have an elementary understanding of the various research areas in statistics (let alone their subfields and certainly not the open problems within them). I have a few questions that I hope someone may help with. How did you all gain a working understanding of these research areas, e.g. causal inference, high-dimensional statistics, Bayesian statistics, etc, without already having a solid foundation (graduate-level coursework) in stats? Would someone be able to explain these various areas? Also what resources I can use to get up to speed? Particularly, are there any references that describe these at a high enough level to understand them broadly, but also at a deep enough level to allow me to understand the formulation of open research problems in these areas? Is this even possible without already having a strong graduate-level foundation in stats? Why do/did you all want to study statistics? (I'd love to hear anonymized personal stories of your journeys and how they led to studying statistics!) I would greatly appreciate all your insight. Thanks!