[MUSIC PLAYING]
CARRIE: The advice I would give to someone just learning R
is that mistakes are part of the process.
Errors and error messages are part of the process.
When I think about the people who
are even better than I am in R, I
think I've come to realize they're not necessarily smarter
than I am, but they may be a little bit more persistent
and delving a little bit deeper.
And certainly, compared to when I started,
I think initially, I'd see an error message
and think I did it wrong.
Like, uh-oh, game over.
And now it's like, oh, that's just part of the game.
When I started to get a little bit of exposure
to what R looked like, I was like, oh.
That seems too sophisticated.
It seems like it probably is really, really hard.
But the people who used it that I had met
were always really enthusiastic about it
and they felt like it had so many advantages
over other software that you can use for running analyses.
There were a lot of times before I used R
where I might use spreadsheets or some other tool,
and I would be trying to hack at what really needed to happen.
Sometimes, I was using multiple tools
because an individual tool couldn't really do
all of what I wanted it to do.
But it's sort of like I knew in my mind
and yet, it wasn't totally fluid, the execution of it.
The more exposure I've gotten to R,
the more I realize a lot of what I would try to do that way,
I can just do within one program and it can all
interlock really fluidly.
At first, I was really unconfident.
I had a couple of scripts where I had some friends who
were better at R, people I worked with who would
sit down and sort of help me go through
and understand the code.
And so, it felt really silly to ask
them the kind of simple question of OK,
but why is it bracket here, or why would we do this?
But they were fortunately really patient people.
And then, at some point, our entire department
said actually, really, everybody needs
to be using this because we need everyone on the same platform.
We need consistency in our analyses.
We need to be able to code review each other's analyses as
well.
And so, we all took an online course together.
And that actually helped me feel really a lot more confident
because it was walking through each step of what
you needed to know.
Got an opportunity to practice and then, it felt like, OK.
Even if there's things I don't know,
I've made it through introduction.
Like, I've made it through this next module.
So I guess I do know something.
And then, once I started to apply it in my work,
there would still be points where I was like, wait.
I don't know how to solve this problem.
And then I would talk to a friend, Google something.
And generally, it was like I knew a lot more
than I thought that I did.
And from that, I suddenly unlocked my ability
to produce a whole lot of analyses
quickly with the big data set, and also produce
a whole lot of data visualizations
really quickly using ggplot2.
Hi, my name is Carrie and I'm a research manager within people
operations at Google.
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