A MScCCAFS alum advised our class to develop a technical skill during our research placements if possible, so I approached my thesis determined to learn how to code. Luckily, the project I ended up working on required some quantitative analysis through R Studio, a free programming software.
After downloading the software, I was definitely a bit intimidated by how unfamiliar and seemingly complicated it appeared to be. However, after watching some YouTube tutorials and referencing training materials from CIAT, the software quickly started to make more and more sense. I also have to give a special shout out to Victoria at CIAT who was my R Studio guru.
The great thing about learning R Studio is that there are a ton of free resources online. I’ve linked the resources that I found most useful below. My learning process certainly wasn’t without its frustrations, but these resources helped me greatly and hopefully they can serve other R Studio newbies well too.
- Data visualization cheat sheet published by R Studio. This cheat sheet is specifically for ggplot2, a data visualization package available on R Studio (and pretty much the only package I used for my analysis).
- The ggplot2 website provides an introduction to the package and has links for other helpful learning resources.
- Global Health with Greg Martin YouTube Channel. If you’re a visual learner like I am, I would definitely recommend watching some YouTube tutorials to start. Greg’s whole channel may not be dedicated to coding, but the videos he has on it are helpful and concise. A lot of the tutorials I found on YouTube were upwards of 1.5 hours and covered way more than I needed to know to analyze my data, so I found this channel’s videos to be more time effective.
- Stack Overflow. I used Stack Overflow for their online Q&A forum where R Studio users post questions and coding specialists respond with solutions. I found that most of the issues I ran into already had multiple solutions on this platform.