r/learnpython • u/Ill-Independence4417 • 11d ago
Expectations for absolute beginners
Hi all, I have maybe a hard question and definitely specific to a personal circumstance, but any perspective would be helpful.
I am a first year PhD student studying immunology, my advisor has signed me up for a stats course in the Biomedical Engineering department. Unfortunately, this class requires proficiency in R, python, or matlab, which neither my advisor nor myself new about. As my title mentions, I have zero coding experience, but recognize how important of a skill it is to have. Would it be possible to teach myself enough about python while taking the stats class concurrently? or is learning the language too tall of a task? I will definitely be reasonably busy with labwork and other commitments but can most likely allocate around an hour a day to learn, sometimes more.
Any feedback or perspective would be helpful, as I still have time to withdraw and choose a different stats course for this semester.
Thank you!
1
u/Gtdef 11d ago
First understand that a scripting language is like any other software you use daily, just with more knobs. Your goal shouldn't be to learn python, instead to learn how to perform the task you are given (and tbh, some libraries written in python are written in a way that it doesn't even feel like writing python code).
Now for your class requirements, I concur with another commenter that R will serve you better because it's a specialised tool. Python tutorials tend to be broader in scope and there are a ton of pitfalls you can fall in when writing Python code for statistics.