Summer holidays and R programming

Academic summers in Stockholm are great. Short weeks, friend’s visiting, summer houses, boat rides and cycling trips. Really, this summer has been ridiculously much like this Swedish beer commercial circa 1994.

But of course it’s not been all play. Actually, I have spent most of the summer doing hours of R ( a pretty amazing, completely free statistical software) programming. I have never seen myself doing statistics or computer programming so I am somewhat puzzled as to how this has become the main feature of my Phd so far. What’s even more surprising is that I am actually enjoying it.

Probably the best part of this R-programming dense summer was attending a week long introduction course to R at the SGDP at King’s College, London http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/depts/mrc/study/summerschool/index.aspx .

Not only is the SGDP a world leading research center in Behavioural Genetics (BG), which reflected in the quality of teaching and the lecturers who presented new topics in BG every morning, but one of my best friends is also doing his MSc there which made the whole thing even better.

Yet this was not enough R for me, I also attended a 2 week seminar focused on using R for twin analyses, run by my co-supervisor Ralf Kuja-Halkola here at MEB, KI.
http://ki.se/meb/start

So take home message to self is; you never know what’s going to end up being your thing so give everything a try. If giving it try involves a trip to London and a breezy academic summer, all the better.