In this first month of my year-long “Month to Master” challenge, I set out to refresh my R skills. But this was not an arbitrary decision – the courses I chose to take tied together into a bigger theme.

• First, I took G. Elliott Morris‘ Analyzing Election and Polling Data in R class on DataCamp. His political analysis through simple manipulation, exploration, and plotting ties into my future ideas and set me up for my February project (which will be using R on political data).
• Second, I took Jeff Li’s Cracking the Data Science Interview course. This covered Python, machine learning, and statistics. It got me thinking mathematically, which applies to the analysis I want to do next month.
• Third, I started an R Shiny course on DataCamp. Shiny will come in handy when I publish my analysis/visualization.

I completed the two courses I intended to and started another one. January goal – accomplished.