Motivation to Learn
As an undergraduate student, I had no real drive to learn at all until I became involved in research. Without any application for what we were learning in classes or ‘hands-on’ activities, I could not focus. It was also hard for me to connect information in classes without examples that we were actively working through. During the summer of my junior year, I had a research opportunity where I was responsible for collecting my own data and performing my own analyses. This active learning context gave me the motivation I needed to apply myself and focus in school.
**After receiving my MS degree, I started at Iowa State University, which has a very passionate group of students and faculty using R for a variety of tasks. Committee members during my MS insisted that I use GUI software that ‘black-boxed’ the majority of my statistical analyses and limited the methodology that I could use. As my research questions became more complex, I needed to pick up R skills to be satisfied with my analysis. Learning R allowed me more freedom to do what I wanted and also got me interested in learning other languages that could maximize my productivity. Being able to actively write code, break it, and improve my scripts became a part of my daily life and has pushed me to keep learning about R, other languages, and how to use them to maximize my productivity.