Optional: Sign Up for Summer Data Mentoring

Do you need a skill upgrade? 

Most RDRC research is empirical. Surveys like the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP) are very complex and may require data wrangling skills you don't have yet.  The 2013 Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information Executive Order has lead to dramatic changes in the way governmental data is accessed. As researchers, these changes open new data access opportunities. However, to get the most out of these resources, and access them efficiently, you may need to acquire new data handling skills. Some data sets are very large and it is inefficient or impractical to post the entire data set as a file for researchers to download. Maybe you'd just like to feel a little more confident using statistical computing programs like Stata or R?

To help fill skills gaps, you'll have the opportunity to continue building data skills throughout the summer through asynchronous activities. Depending on your needs and current skill set, these activities may include:

• DataCamp training courses (available free of charge to JSIT scholars)
• UW Madison Social Science Computing Center tutorials for Stata and R
• Project management resources for statistical computing in Stata and R
• RStudio Guided Labs for beginner to advanced users, including how to author academic papers in RMarkdown
• Training to access data through APIs
• Data Visualization activities for Tableau, R, Stata and Excel

Mary will be your point of contact for these activities.

The first step in the Data Mentoring process will be a one-on-one consultation with Mary to identify your strengths, skills gaps, goals, and available time to devote to learning in July and August. We'll draft a game plan together. There is no required minimum time investment or penalty for noncompletion. Assignments will be tailored to you. Please sign up on Mary's Office Hours sheet for a post-JSIT consultation. If you are not available at the times listed, please email Mary at mkhamman@wisc.edu and we'll proceed asynchronously.