1.2 Why should I use R?

For now: because this whole class revolves around your using R. If you don’t, you’ll fail or look silly at a job interview. I started using R because I needed it to finish my master’s thesis. I’d like to think some people start using R “just because” they want to, but usually those people just say they want to start it.

Students are in a unique position to be able to do the things they want to do because they have to do them (somebody write that down). Most of us should probably make it more of a priority.

On that note, hopefully the “why” becomes obvious to you during our time together even if you don’t want to be a data scientist or a modeler. If you only ever use R to do t-tests or make descriptive plots it is worth learning. The ability to re-use the same code for a later analysis alone can save you hours. You never lose what you write (and back up!). So, the more and the longer you write R code, the more time you will have to do other things in life that you care more about (as if). If R is what you’ll love, than hopefully we can help you enjoy that more, too. It’s the software that everyone is using because of these things and more, and the development community has continued to grow during the past two decades. That means help is everywhere. Go Google it.