Description
or, general musings
In 2018, I found myself in the situation that many grad students do: I had a bunch of data, but I didn’t know the first thing about how to analyze it. Also, I knew that people were using this thing called R but I installed it on my computer and opened it up, but nothing was working?? (I didn’t know what the RStudio IDE was, unfortunately).
Sam Csik and I were in the same boat, so we both elbowed our way into Allison Horst’s stats class in the Bren School for Environmental Management. Flash forward to Spring 2019: we started attending R-Ladies Santa Barbara meetups (at that point run by its founders, Allison, Jamie Montgomery, and Julie Stewart-Lowndes). They asked for ideas for workshops - especially anyone who’d want to lead a workshop - and emphasized that you didn’t have to be an expert in a field to do a workshop; sometimes the best way to learn a tool is to teach about it!
Sam and I thought we could lead a workshop on wrangling data using {tidyverse} packages, so we volunteered. I remember being pretty nervous going in (how was I, a mere amateur going to teach people how to code?). But it went great!
And flash forward to 2023: Sam and I, along with Camila Vargas Poulsen and Danielle Ferraro, are co-organizers of R-Ladies Santa Barbara. Sam is the Data Training Coordinator for the Masters of Environmental Data Science program at Bren, and I am still messing around in R - but at least I know what RStudio is now!