Why Should I Learn R?

There are many benefits to learning R! In order to help keep our motivation and enthusiasm as driving forces to help us jump into a potentially scary world or computer programming, we would like to highlight some of the benefits of R:

02–A: Free with a large support community

R is 100% free! This has many resulting benefits:

1) This is great for your wallet

2) This is great for equity

3) This has lead to a large online support community. Virtually any question you have can be answered (multiple times) via a quick Google search.

From Pirates guide to R (https://bookdown.org/ndphillips/YaRrr/why-is-r-so-great.html):

"A huge community of R programmers will constantly develop an distribute new R functionality and packages at a speed that leaves all those other packages in the dust! Unlike Fight Club, the first rule of R is “Do talk about R!” The size of the R programming community is staggering. If you ever have a question about how to implement something in R, a quick Poogle search will lead you to your answer virtually every single time."

02–B: Career Marketability

R is one of the most in-demand programming languages. In job advertisements with programs mentioned, R was in the top 5 in 2019. Some companies that use R include Facebook, Google, Bing, J.PMorgan, John Deere, Zillow, Booz Allen Hamilton, The New York Times, and many others!

02–C: Graduate School Marketability

Because R is so versatile and allows for open source code, it is one of the most popular programs that are used in graduate school. Having experience in R is something that would look good for graduate school applications.

02–D: Versatile Statistical Program

R is so versatile! Any statistical computation or analysis you want to perform can be done in R or you can program a new analysis to run in R!

02–E: Promotes Open Science

R is open to all! With being freely accessible and allowing for the code to be posted and shared it enables researchers to post their analysis code for all to see, use and replicate! To see more you can view these slides (see cover art below) from Dr. Julia Stewart Lowndes (https://jules32.github.io/useR-2019-keynote/#22) or read her published article about these topics (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0160).

02–G: Helps with other academic courses

Future Education: Many courses at UMD and many other Universities and Colleges are now using R as the statistical program of choice. Learning it now will help you with these future classes.

Logical Thinking: The process of learning R (or any program) helps make us make our thoughts and steps explicit and logical. This is a great skill that can generalize to any other programming language as well as critical thinking in any course and career!