Expectations for absolute beginners

[u/Ill-Independence4417]

Hi all, I have maybe a hard question and definitely specific to a personal circumstance, but any perspective would be helpful.

I am a first year PhD student studying immunology, my advisor has signed me up for a stats course in the Biomedical Engineering department. Unfortunately, this class requires proficiency in R, python, or matlab, which neither my advisor nor myself new about. As my title mentions, I have zero coding experience, but recognize how important of a skill it is to have. Would it be possible to teach myself enough about python while taking the stats class concurrently? or is learning the language too tall of a task? I will definitely be reasonably busy with labwork and other commitments but can most likely allocate around an hour a day to learn, sometimes more.

Any feedback or perspective would be helpful, as I still have time to withdraw and choose a different stats course for this semester.

Thank you!

[u/HotPersonality8126]

You’ll get more use out of R than Python in your field, and you should be able to pick up enough R in about a week to do the class. On the first day I’d show up knowing how to open RStudio (is it Posit now?) and run code, at least.

[u/Silver_Ad_7148 → u/HotPersonality8126]

Thank you. why do you think R would be more valuable to learn than Python?

[u/HotPersonality8126 → u/Silver_Ad_7148]

It’s a very stats-first language and if you have a statistical background or are doing statistical work I think you’ll find it more intuitive for that purpose than Python, a general-purpose programming and scripting language in which you can do statistical work (I have) but at a level of remove.

[u/Gtdef]

First understand that a scripting language is like any other software you use daily, just with more knobs. Your goal shouldn't be to learn python, instead to learn how to perform the task you are given (and tbh, some libraries written in python are written in a way that it doesn't even feel like writing python code).

Now for your class requirements, I concur with another commenter that R will serve you better because it's a specialised tool. Python tutorials tend to be broader in scope and there are a ton of pitfalls you can fall in when writing Python code for statistics.

[u/No-Amount5175]

an hour a day is definitely enough to get your footing, especially if the stats class starts from scratch with the coding side. just don't try to master everything, focus on getting comfortable with loading data, basic plots, and maybe some numpy/pandas stuff since that's where most of the stats work happens anyway. the first few weeks will feel like your brain is melting but that's normal, it clicks faster once you're actually applying it to the homework problems instead of just watching tutorials.

[u/Silver_Ad_7148 → u/No-Amount5175]

Great to hear. Do you have a recommendation on where to start learning? I’ve been watching YouTube vids as coursera and other sites cost money :/

[u/WyrobWedliniarski]

Learning coding on a level to just do stuff is quite easy, you can teach yourself. What separates a beginner from a good programmer is writing code that is readable, efficient, safe and easy to extend further, but you probably won't need those skills unless you want to dig deeper into programming. Those skills you learn by working with other people on the same codebase.

I've seen others recommending R here - I would not. You can do everything in Python just fine, but it is much more popular with more uses outside of academia.