For this month, my goal is to brush up on my R skills. I committed to completing a DataCamp course and my buddy Jeff Li’s data science hiring course.

Since two of my passions are data analytics and politics, I thought it would be perfect to start with a DataCamp political analytics course taught by data journalist Elliott Morris (NOTE: course requires a subscription to complete). It’s an extremely short course (only about 4 hours to complete), which is a perfect way to get a “quick win” to start off the year. I was able to complete it over a few evenings.

In this course, I learned R fundamentals such as:

• dplyr
• lubridate
• ggplot2
• linear regression

I also got some ideas for analysis projects I can do later in the year.

Now, I’ll be starting a more generalized course, Cracking the Data Science Interview by the aforementioned Jeff Li.