What I learned from Harvard’s Data Science: R basics course
Data is just a collection of numbers until you transform it to tell an impactful story. And once you make sense of the data, you can drive better decision making.
I’ve always been fascinated by the power of data, which motivated me to enroll in the online Data Science program offered by Harvard University. In order to earn this professional certificate in Data Science, you need to complete 9 courses, including a capstone project.
Recently, I successfully completed the first course in this Data Science program called Data Science : R basics. This is my first-ever certificate from an Ivy League School. So, Yay!
Course Structure
I’m sharing a high-level course overview here for those of you who might be interested in pursuing it. This course is divided into 4 sections:
- Section 1: R basics, functions, and data types
- Section 2: Vectors, Sorting
- Section 3: Indexing, Data Wrangling, plots
- Section 4: Programming basics
Section 1 introduces you to R (R is an open-source programming language, which is similar to Python). All the basics are covered in this section, including how to install R and RStudio.
Section 2 introduces you to vectors and functions such as sorting. You will learn to create numeric and character vectors, sort vectors and perform arithmetic operations between vectors.
Section 3 introduces the R commands and techniques that help you wrangle, analyze, and visualize data. You will learn how to filter datasets, create data frames, modify data tables, data wrangling with dplyr and visualizing data using box plots, histograms and scatter plots.
Section 4 focuses on basic programming concepts like ‘if-else’ and ‘for-loop’ commands. Each section has multiple assessments to make sure you understand the concepts. You need to get a passing grade in order to receive the course completion certificate.
On the whole, it was a good learning experience. I had some experience with R prior to taking this course. However, I do not think that prior programming knowledge is needed to complete this course.
I’ve taken the next step in my data journey and may be, you should too, to stay ahead of the game in an increasingly data-driven world we live in today!
