A reflection on project 1
This post addresses the following prompts:
Write a blog post reflecting on your project (what was the purpose of the project, what did you learn, what you would do differently, etc.).
Project 1 was a chance to put the skills that we have learned about so far into practice. The primary purpose was to write functions to maipulate a certain data set and to then automatically plot the returned data. Although it was not an easy project for me by any means, I thoroughly enjoyed the real world aspect of this assignment.
While I deepened my understanding of many different aspects of using R Studio, writing functions was absolutely where I grew the most. It took rereading the notes on functions, watching videos online, and trial-and-error before I finally grasped how to properly create a function; however, I was able to quickly extend my understanding to create the subsequent functions with ease once working through the first one. The other areas where I struggled most were in figuring out how to subset the data by county/noncounty, creating the “division” variable, and assigning a “top”/”bottom” command to order the data. I feel that I found these three tasks to be partiucularly challenging because there are many different ways to accomplish each and a plethora of search results were returned when I was learning about each. I don’t believe that I chose the best and most efficient way to accomplish each of these tasks, but I look forward to reviewing the solution to compare.
If I were starting the project over again, I would start it as soon as it was assigned in order to have more opportuities to visit Office Hours well in advance of the deadline, before they become crowded with many other students. I also regret not contributing to the class discussion board - I am often fearful of being called out for providing incorrect feedback, but that in itself would actually be a wonderful learning opportunity for me. I have set a personal goal of contributing at least once during the next project.