So for the past few months since August, I’ve been sprucing up on my skills in R through the Coursera online course designed by a couple of folks from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Biostatistics. It’s been interesting to pick up not only data analytics skills but learning about the different tools and platforms available online just for presenting data, doing visualizations and all that fancy stuff. I find it amazing how I first learn about Bootstrap, Spline Regressions, Permutation Tests, and a couple of other statistical techniques that might be useful in Econometrics through some of those courses in the Data Science Specialization.
So shortly after picking up those cool skills and programming some rather sophisticated looking data processing stuff (at least in my opinion), I actually started presenting stuff on various platforms using R! I wrote my first data analysis report on Rpubs, started a Github account and picked up Git (just a little; I simply wasn’t geeky enough), developed this rather useless fancy webapp and then even pumped out somewhat cooler slides to pitch it. All in all, I believe I gained more in this 3 months of learning from the series of online course than stuff I picked up in school over the past year (granted, that Advanced Math course sure was tough and made me feel like I picked up something, though I promptly forgot all of them).