Learner Profiles
Florence the Field Ecologist
Florence is in the first year of a PhD studying species distributions, and has just returned from several months of fieldwork with spreadsheets full of survey data. She has used Excel for small datasets before, but her most recent field season produced thousands of rows spread across multiple files, and she is worried about making mistakes when cleaning and combining them by hand. Florence wants to learn how to load and organise her data in R, clean it up reliably, and produce plots she can bring to her supervisor for feedback.
Tom the Transitioning Analyst
Tom works in a university’s research support team and has years of experience using Excel and SPSS to analyse survey and administrative data. He can produce the tables and charts his colleagues ask for, but each request means starting from scratch, and he can’t easily redo an analysis when the underlying data changes. Tom is taking the course because his team is moving towards R, and he wants to build confidence writing scripts rather than pointing and clicking, so his work is faster to update and easier for colleagues to check.
Claire the Clinical Researcher
Claire is a postdoctoral researcher in a clinical trials unit, working with patient outcome data that must be handled carefully and consistently across multiple sites. She is comfortable with basic statistics but has only ever used pre-written scripts handed down from previous lab members, and doesn’t fully understand what each step does. Claire hopes the course will help her understand how to manipulate and summarise data confidently herself, so she can adapt existing scripts and troubleshoot problems rather than relying on trial and error.
Robin the Reluctant Coder
Robin is a final-year PhD student in Environmental Science who has avoided programming until now, but his final PhD study involves a large climate dataset that is too unwieldy for Excel or SPSS. Robin has never written code of any kind and finds the idea intimidating, but has been told R will make his analysis and figures far easier to manage. Robin is hoping the course will demystify R just enough to load his data, produce the plots he needs, and give him the confidence to keep learning afterwards.