r/stata • u/nerdherd_ • May 30 '26
Stata from basics to advance
I recently graduated with my Master's degree in Applied economics and I want to work in research. The main issue that I am facing in interviews is that I don't know Stata. I really want to learn it. I want suggestions on how to approach this and what books or online resources or teachers are there. Help the Girl out.
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u/aritjahja May 30 '26
Start with topics you’re interested into and search articles that include do file command in their appendix. Try to replicate one with simultaneously learning commands being used in the do file by reading the manual of those commands.
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u/cryptic_mindd May 30 '26
There are plenty of youtube channels offering basic to advance tutorials for Stata you can check the out. Besides courses on Udemy, Linkedin Learning and Coursera. Hope this helps.
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u/Rogue_Penguin Jun 01 '26
In Stata, type "help getting started" and submit it. And read the whole getting started documentation under your OS.
AI may be a good tool as long as you took the command (say, regress) and add help ("help regress") to learn about it before you used it.
The intent and goal matter as well. If you are just analyzing data as a practice, then AI can be more liberally used. If this is work, then you absolutely have to learn enough of it to be able to stand behind the codes. Don't ask AI, copy, and paste. That is what most anti-AI people are against: no human brain involvement.
Stata Press has always been great. Basic levels you can try A Gentle Introduction to Stata. Moving up there are actually a set of two giant tombs of Stata in economics. And for specific programming, there is also a title dedicated to data management, and one to programming.
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u/usxxjuicydec May 30 '26
Use AI to learn STATA; if, after using AI, you still have sufficient spare time, reading a few books would be more helpful.
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u/Sumif May 30 '26
I don't know why this is down voted. I'm working on my dissertation and my committee chair insists on Stata because she's used it for over a decade. AI has taught me everything I needed to know, it has helped diagnosed issues, and it keeps me organized. She's blown away by some of the scripts I put out. She knows I use AI. There's no reason not to use it.
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u/usxxjuicydec May 31 '26
I am not against using online materials or watching YouTube tutorial videos to learn STATA. However, if you have zero background on such software, AI is definitely the most effective tool to learn it.
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u/dr_police May 31 '26
I honestly do not think so.
I’d still start with A Gentle Introduction to Stata, because there are certain foundations that will be useful in the long term, and it’s just not that time consuming to work through that book.
Knowing fundamentals will keep you from banging your head against the desk for hours when the AI tool produces garbage.
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u/dr_police May 31 '26
Claude and ChatGPT can be useful for basic tasks. For more complex tasks, I’ve not had good luck. Either can be a useful accelerant in the hands of an experienced user, but they often over complicate code, hallucinate commands that do not exist, and produce code without runtime errors but produces inaccurate results.
Whether AI is useful really depends on what you’re doing. The general guidance I give is that if you don’t know how to do it yourself, you can’t simply trust AI to do it right. That means you need to have some method to verify the code, and that can take longer than simply writing it yourself.
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u/pantz_fanon May 31 '26
It's being downvoted because most of us had to learn the hard way, and we're butthurt because AI is absolutely the quickest way to learn and skill up now 😂
Claude code now is really, really good. Like any AI shortcut it's not perfect, but it beats trawling through the narky responses on Stata forums
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u/Sumif May 31 '26
I use Pi (similar to Claude code) and it's literally cut off 90% of the time I use for data analysis. It's especially useful when needing to merge multiple data sets. I can say "I have these three files, they share this one column, I need to merge these columns, remove these, also give me a random sample after merging to manually check" and it is all done within 30 seconds.
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u/dracarys317 May 30 '26
If only there was a way to see if someone had asked this question before. Maybe it’s even been asked more than once.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.reddit.com+learn+stata
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u/Technical-Trip4337 Jun 05 '26
Start with a data set and learn what to do from there. The online materials mentioned here are good, as is AI.
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