Courses
WSDS 2017 will offer two half-day courses on Thursday, October 19. Courses are ticketed events that require an additional fee.
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Calibrating Your “GPS” (Growth in Professionalism - Strategies)
Instructor: Rochelle Tractenberg, Georgetown University
Professional goals are crucial elements in career planning and achievement. Like a compass, concrete goals help us get back on our chosen trajectory when the unavoidable distractions from inside and outside work push us off. Goals can help us chart our path and even help with leveraging experiences as growth opportunities that might otherwise seem more like “drifting” than purposeful, forward momentum.
This course will provide instruction and guidance on setting, documenting, and evaluating progress toward reasonable short-, medium-, and long-term professional goals. During the course, we will discuss identification and formulation of goals, sequencing; the importance and generation of evidence of achievement, and use of this evidence to create a plan for next-stage goal setting. This interactive workshop will comprise a few brief lectures, individual work, and small- and large-group discussions.
Pre-conference registration will include submission of at least one specific short-term (up to 1 year to complete), medium-term (1–3 years to complete), and long-term (3–10 years to complete) goal. These professional goals will not be shared unless participants choose to, but they are essential to focus workshop activities that are relevant for each individual. Participants should bring a laptop and current version of their CV or résumé, as well as come prepared for active and reflective participation.
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Writing R Functions for Fun and Profit
Instructor: Jenny Bryan, RStudio & University of British Columbia
If there’s a bit of R code you copy and paste repeatedly, package it in a function! User-written functions are a great way to increase your effectiveness in many contexts: scripts; R Markdown documents; R notebooks; Shiny apps; and, of course, R packages. Compared to highly repetitive code, functions can increase code quality while reducing programmer aggravation. Many principles of design and process work well across domains. This workshop will be useful to those new to writing functions, as well as those more experienced (e.g., ready to start writing packages). We will finish with coverage of functional programming and how to use it for iteration in R.