On the hunt for ways to improve my knowledge of R, I stumbled upon the greater Boston area chapter of R-Ladies and decided to go to one of their meetups. As luck would have it, I did not have to wait very long for one of the monthly meetings to occur: Upon joining, the next meetup was only two days away, so I swallowed my anxieties regarding impostor syndrome and decided to go.
Impostor Syndrome
Impostor syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the term, is when a person believes that they are an unqualified fraud. Since science is an incredibly specialized and intellectual field, impostor syndrome is fairly common, and I have experienced it when going to conferences, asking professors for help, or even just talking to the other people in my lab.
Going into the event, I was incredibly nervous. Although the MeetUp app said that beginners were welcome, I felt like I didn’t know enough R to follow along the presentation and I was worried that if I coded anything, I might run into embarrassing error messages that I wouldn’t know how to fix.
The Experience
Upon walking into the Vertex Pharmaceuticals building where the MeetUp was held, I was super nervous because I’m an introvert at heart. I had to check in at the front desk, and they gave me a visitor pass with my name on it (I felt very official and grown-up).
When the meeting started, we all went around the table and introduced ourselves. Others listed their accomplishments (PhD, postdoc, grad students, full-on data analysts with real grown-up jobs). When I introduced myself as an undergraduate and explained that I’m teaching myself R, I waited for someone to stand up and throw me out of the room (Spoiler Alert: No one did. Take that, impostor syndrome!).
During the meetup, Dr. Meredith Brown, a data scientist at Vertex, talked a little bit about the Tidyverse and how to best organize one’s workflow using RMarkdown. She reminded us to make smaller scripts in different working directories, to group mutate() functions in Dplyr by purpose rather than stringing them all together, and to indent code so that it is readable and not really long and horrid. She also shared a fascinating sample data set that tracked citizen reports of rats in and around Somerville, Massachusetts, and found that there were more rats in certain parts of the city.
The Takeaways
Overall, I really enjoyed my experience at the MeetUp and plan to get more involved in the community of the R-Ladies Boston because of how nice and supportive the environment was. Since I hope to go into data science in the future, it’s a good group to be a part of.
I even met a few new people at the end of the meeting, and showed them pictures of lizards on my phone, which is apparently how I get people to like me. I also got a bunch of cool R stickers to put on my laptop (see below). There is going to be another R-Ladies Boston MeetUp in April 2019, and I definitely plan on going!
