Accepted and have time to try something new: what would you do?

[FlipOneSock]

I've been working as an ER scribe for over a year now and want to try something new before school starts. What would you try to do if you had a six month break?

I already plan on exploring my hobbies more and learning a bit of ASL, but I'd like to find something new to do for work as well. Maybe travel abroad on a service trip?

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[Lannister]

Ha, I was actually going to say "I'd learn ASL".
If you have the money, definitely travel. You're probably not going to have the chance to travel for a long time. I wouldn't even do a service trip, I'd just travel for fun.

 

[Kr#36]

My plan is to learn to be a good poker player. It may be ignorance or it may be the nerd in me but I have this fantasy that after I get an acceptance(knock on wood) this upcoming cycle I am going to read a lot of books, practice a ton, and become good at poker. Stupid but it sounds fun to me.

 

[Pagan FutureDoc]

Hiking trip in Patagonia.

 

[BombsAway]

Go somewhere without any people and embrace the silence. Chop wood, make a fire, build your own canoe. Talk to bears.

 

[zurc2014]

Sky dive!!! lol No really Im doing this next month lol

 

[mmmcdowe]

get a good gym routine

 

[Mclovin0351]

I just signed up for an ultramarathon in June and I'll also be camping as much as possible. Reading as much as I can, largely history.

 

[Dr.Kitty]

I would learn how to cook if you don't, I know that's definitely on my bucket list before hopefully starting med school.

 

[Frogger27]

Jumpstart your adult film career

 

[TheRevenant]

Play hockey and play the drums more than I currently do. Still waiting on those II's though.

 

[Yorick]

Au pair in Europe

 

[libertyyne]

Learning R, Python, and spending quality time with the family.

 

[TheRevenant]

Learning R, Python, and spending quality time with the family.

codefights.org is a cool place to test your coding skills. If you're familiar with other languages, you might find this a good place to learn. I know they use Python, not sure about R.

 

[kb1900]

Learning R, Python, and spending quality time with the family.

if you're not working you could probably do both of these in a month!

R takes no time/not much effort at all if you have any coding background - but I took a specific stats class for it.

Python is where I'd start!

 

[james11]

Read books, travel

 

[ChrisMack390]

I'm going to teach English and learn Spanish in Ecuador

 

[WedgeDawg]

Learn to cook healthy, tasty, relatively quick and easy meals and get yourself into the habit of doing so.

Start exercising if you haven't already and get yourself into the habit of doing so regularly

I second learning R - very very useful for research. Python is also helpful, but not quite as much.

 

[Ehwic]

Learning R, Python, and spending quality time with the family.

Was not anticipating anyone to bring coding up! I would actually say start with python first to really get the basics down prior to R. R's syntax is a little more convoluted in my opinion. I ended up learning R first then Python and that's cause Im well versed in another similar package.

 

[Frogger27]

Why is R and Python so useful for research??

 

[TheRevenant]

Why is R and Python so useful for research??

I believe that R was designed with statistical analysis in mind. Python has a plethora of libraries, so I imagine that there are a number of robust data analysis packages. It's also a very simple programming language

 

[DingoPingo]

resolve subconscious trauma from your youth

or maybe that's just what I call it when I stay inside and sleep all day

 

[Halcyon32]

Go somewhere without any people and embrace the silence. Chop wood, make a fire, build your own canoe. Talk to bears.

I like this idea but unless you're referring to Bear Grylls, I'd say skip the last part.

 

[gyngyn]

Spanish.

 

[WedgeDawg]

Why is R and Python so useful for research??

The statistical prowess and flexibility of R is unparalleled in terms of being able to crunch data and get vital information. If you know how to use R at a slightly above basic level, you can adapt when you need to use a particular package.

One example I'll give are receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves, a metric used to look at the sensitivity and specificity of a test with a binary outcome at different cutoff values. It's used for things like scoring systems and basically shows how accurate the test is overall and, if you want very high sensitivity (or specificity for some reason), you can see what your cutoff value will be. The way that the accuracy of the test is determined is by using the area under the ROC (AUROC or AUC) which is a value between 0 and 1, with an AUC of 1 being a perfect test and 0.5 meaning random chance and 0 being perfectly inaccurate. Calculating an AUC by hand, especially for a large dataset, would be nearly impossible, and it's not something that can be calculated by standard stuff like Excel. Both R and python, provided you know how, allow you to take an enormous dataset, generate an ROC curve, calculate the AUC, and compare the AUCs of two different tests for a similar outcome (or whatever) and see if they are statistically different or not (well this last part you can do in R, I'm not sure about python, or at least I haven't figured out how yet).

That's just one example. But if you're playing with data, you're going to want to know how to do stats beyond a basic Excel level. R, matlab, and python are the 3 things I see used most often. In terms of order you should learn them, R is the most useful universally, and then matlab and python you should decide between based on the needs of your lab/project.

 

[Turkishking]

My dream is to travel once I've been accepted into medical school. I think you should consider traveling, and have fun. Besides, you will be required to recall and learn copious amounts of material in medical school. So why not have fun?

 

[Frogger27]

Thanks for the detailed response @WedgeDawg . In my current lab we have a great biostatistician who runs all of our numbers, but maybe I will try to pick this up in the next couple of months in case there are any opportunities to crunch some numbers and get on some papers in medical school.

 

[WedgeDawg]

Thanks for the detailed response @WedgeDawg . In my current lab we have a great biostatistician who runs all of our numbers, but maybe I will try to pick this up in the next couple of months in case there are any opportunities to crunch some numbers and get on some papers in medical school.

Not all labs will have a biostatistician available - you can usually consult with one, but your lab/department will probably have to pay for it. It's an enormous asset to be able to do statistical work yourself and the effort spent learning it will pay off many times over.

 

[Frogger27]

Not all labs will have a biostatistician available - you can usually consult with one, but your lab/department will probably have to pay for it. It's an enormous asset to be able to do statistical work yourself and the effort spent learning it will pay off many times over.

What recommendations do you have to start teaching myself this??

 

[Gastrapathy]

Move to a Spanish speaking country and immerse yourself. Enjoy the food and drink and learn the language.

 

[WedgeDawg]

What recommendations do you have to start teaching myself this??

To be honest, I don't really know how to use R beyond a super basic level because one of my colleagues is a whiz at it and it was just easier for him to handle that. I learned python this summer by having a code already in the lab that did sort of what we want just very slowly, but it was a clever code that set up the basis for what we ended up using, and in order to make it what we wanted, I had to look up what parts of the original code did, whether or not there were other ways to do the same kind of thing, what packages to install, how to use those packages, and then all the general stuff like how to use loops, how to nest things, how to call variables or functions etc (sorry if this terminology is wrong, I'm not a computer scientist) I just picked up from looking at code on the internet trying to figure stuff out.

Essentially the point I'm trying to make is that once you have a very basic level of understanding of the language (either R or python), it's easier to learn (at least in my experience) by having a project to work on and then learning things needed in order to complete that project. I've tried just going through one of those online learn python in 5 days things or whatever and it was so boring that I never got anywhere, but once my goal was to actually do something with the code, the learning just kind of happened.

If you have no programming experience at all, I would do that learn R from scratch thing (there are a billion, just google it) for like a few hours, then give yourself a project, even if it's silly, and figure out how to make whichever language you choose do what you need it to.

Maybe some people with a real CS background can chime in as I don't really have experience with this, but that's just how I did it.

 

[libertyyne]

What recommendations do you have to start teaching myself this??

There is coursera course on R, it also has an R based tutorial called swirl, which I am finding useful. The other thing that i feel like is cool is cleaning up data, Excel and Access are terrible at cleaning up data prior to analysis and it is a regular pita. R and python makes is significantly easier to fix that problem. The reason this is important is because usually when you get large datasets from EMR or similar sources it needs a fairly large amount of work cleaning up the data vs doing the actual analysis which is easy.

I would second the having a problem that needs to be solved, because that generates motivation and a desire to learn the tools to solve the problem.

All that being said, I am a noob, and am still trying to figure all this stuff out so take my advice with a grain of salt.

 

[WedgeDawg]

There is coursera course on R, it also has an R based tutorial called swirl, which I am finding useful. The other thing that i feel like is cool is cleaning up data, Excel and Access are terrible at cleaning up data prior to analysis and it is a regular pita. R and python makes is significantly easier to fix that problem. The reason this is important is because usually when you get large datasets from EMR or similar sources it needs a fairly large amount of work cleaning up the data vs doing the actual analysis which is easy.

I would second the having a problem that needs to be solved, because that generates motivation and a desire to learn the tools to solve the problem.

All that being said, I am a noob, and am still trying to figure all this stuff out so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Cleaning data in excel is a nightmare. I ended up writing a jury-rigged visualbasic script that did it for me, but it's such an imperfect solution. Turns out you can do it on R super easily.

 

[turtles43]

I am going to try and learn Spanish and travel as much as I can!

 

[Ehwic]

What recommendations do you have to start teaching myself this??

Datacamp, reddit/r/R, and of the likes are all great resources. reddit would provide you with external links that refers to sites like datacamp that are interactive in teaching you R. If all you are really interested in is analysis, R would be your best approach. If you want a broader scope on programming, I would suggest python.

 

[Frogger27]

Datacamp, reddit/r/R, and of the likes are all great resources. reddit would provide you with external links that refers to sites like datacamp that are interactive in teaching you R. If all you are really interested in is analysis, R would be your best approach. If you want a broader scope on programming, I would suggest python.

Definitely just want it for data analysis purposes. Thank you!