A new academic year means new skills to learn!
CoDA organizers reviewed the membership survey results that were collected over the summer and discovered that people wanted more introductory workshops. To make this happen, we called on two HBS staff and one vendor to provide trainings on Stata, RStudio, and Excel. We offered these workshops in the afternoon with some snacks (such as vegetarian sushi, sausage rolls, and whoopie pies) to keep things fun and informal.
Didn’t get a chance to attend some or any of these workshops? The content below will give an overview of the events along with some requestable resources and Zoom recordings.
Stata [09/26/23]
Chuck Huber from Stata came all the way to Boston to give us an expert overview of the application. He focused on the basics of importing data, managing directories, evaluating data, and analysis. Chuck also spent some time distinguishing the differences between the point-and-click and coding interfaces for accomplishing tasks—spoiler: sometimes the best route depends on the task at hand! The second half of the presentation shifted to data management and wrangling.
If you want access to Chuck’s presentation slides and/or the Zoom recording of the workshop, please email coda@hbs.edu
RStudio [10/25/23]
Jeremy Zimmett (aka the person typing up this post) gave an in-person workshop on using RStudio for introductory data analysis. Attendees got to play with real data from the San Francisco Public Library—but it had been sabotaged. Our goal was to learn how to analyze and clean it back up! The learning model here was a bit different, as everyone had the code already written out for them; the focus was on unpacking what all the commands and syntax meant.
If you want access to Jeremy’s homegrown R data dictionary, please email coda@hbs.edu. This event was in-person only and not recorded.
Excel [11/15/23]
Patrick Clapp gave an unreal Excel workshop almost entirely from the comfort of his keyboard. He became an Excel expert by locking away his mouse in a desk drawer to force himself to learn the keyboard shortcuts for almost every GUI-based command. The focus of this workshop was on leveling up your Excel skills and going beyond what some functions, like VLOOKUP, can offer. Topics included: text cleanup, normalization, merging, counting, and complex counting. This was our most popular workshop with over 80 attendees!
If you would like access to Patrick’s Star Wars themed Excel file (which contains examples and tips) or the Zoom recording of the workshop, please email coda@hbs.edu