Programming Languages

[-phantom-]

Hello!

I have a few months off before starting school in July. I am working a pretty lax consulting job rn, and want to use the extra time off to learn a skill that will allow me to help provide value in clinical research labs. The school I want to attend has a research honors track, in which clinical research is an area of focus. (The reason I am focused on clinical research, is because I already have a few basic science papers (1 first author, 3 second author, and 1 co-first author) and I am just honestly burnt out of basic science work. From what I understand, being proficient in some sort of stats programming is very useful.

Are there any languages in particular I should focus on? I know R is a big one, but what about SPSS? Some others have also suggested Phython.

Does anyone recommend a particular course? I'd love to be able to have a certificate of some sort, just so I can show that I have some sort of formal training and, hopefully, a solid foundation to build from.

Thank you all in advance

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[Lawpy]

I don't think a certificate is necessary but learning R or Python will help. The other stuff is optional

 

[-phantom-]

I don't think a certificate is necessary but learning R or Python will help. The other stuff is optional

Thank you!

 

[NotAProgDirector]

My answer is going to be a bit counter culture, and non standard. I do a bunch of coding work on the side - I am decently fluent in web tech (HTML, CSS, javascript/jquery, NodeJS, VueJS, Coldfusion), dabbled in R and python, various forms of C, and my newest language of choice is M.

But you know what has actually been the most helpful for research projects? Visual Basic for Applications for Excel combined with the RealStats extension. It's quite amazing what you can do with VBA - lots of data manipulation and cleaning. And RealStats does just fine for most normal sized databases.

Of note, Google sheets now has a decent scripting language, so that could be a decent choice also (and is very similar).

 

[zorcandpals]

SPSS isn't worth much it seems. Most of the things you can do in it you can do in R or python and either of those two can do much more.

I would say get the basics of working in R or python (data cleaning, basic descriptive and inferential statistics) and then think about the types of projects you want to eventually do. Do you want to do ML and clinical research? Build some app that does some clinical function? etc.

 

[Tangerine123]

R is universal

For the others I would wait and see what toolkits/software packages you will use and learn accordingly.

I use Python for genetics and Matlab for neuroimaging.

 

[Lawpy]

My answer is going to be a bit counter culture, and non standard. I do a bunch of coding work on the side - I am decently fluent in web tech (HTML, CSS, javascript/jquery, NodeJS, VueJS, Coldfusion), dabbled in R and python, various forms of C, and my newest language of choice is M.

But you know what has actually been the most helpful for research projects? Visual Basic for Applications for Excel combined with the RealStats extension. It's quite amazing what you can do with VBA - lots of data manipulation and cleaning. And RealStats does just fine for most normal sized databases.

Of note, Google sheets now has a decent scripting language, so that could be a decent choice also (and is very similar).

Interesting you mention that since i'm using something similar