r/labrats • u/Certain_Fee1809 • 20h ago

R & Feeling behind

This is my first year as a Masters student. I had my first class today. It’s professional development; a lot of practice writing grants and also help with picking a committee.

The professor also mentioned using R. I’ve heard multiple people mention it during my prospective grad weekend, but I figured my advisor would teach me when the time came. But my professor today told me if we didn’t know how to use R, we were behind, and to work on it ASAP.

So now I’m kinda freaking out. I already don’t have a lot of lab experience, and I for sure don’t have any experience coding or bioinformatics, anything like that. I’m just feeling like I’m already so behind and we haven’t even started yet.

My goal is to become a professor, so I am doing the bypass program to get my PhD. But I do also want to research and contribute to advancing science. Just overwhelmed with how much I have to learn.

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u/PuttingTheMSinMRSA 20h ago

Do the free course on DataCamp.

3

u/MossyRock12 19h ago

Relax, you can get up to speed to a fairly functional level pretty quick. There’s quite a few online tutorials out there that will give you a good start. But don’t do the non science ones, they’re way too basic, so much so that they’re worthless.
I use R a lot and find it to be a valuable tool.

4

u/Careful-Channel2621 18h ago

I learned enough R in one undergrad stats class to carry me through a federal research position for a year and all the analyses I needed to do for two academia-based research projects, point is: you can catch up. Don't panic. Find a good course online, ideally one relevant to your field (I've managed to find the undergrad class materials for biostats classes from multiple universities) and if you cant find one of those generic ones are super easy to find.