The advice I would give to someone just learning R is that mistakes are part of the process. Errors and error messages are part of the process. When I think about the people who are even better than I am in R, I've come to realize they're not necessarily smarter than I am, but they may be a little bit more persistent and delving a little bit deeper. Certainly compared to when I started, initially I'd see an error message and think, "I did it wrong, uh-oh, game over. " Now it's like, "That's just part of the game." When I started to get a little bit of exposure to what R looked like, I was like, "That seems too sophisticated. It seems like that probably is really hard." But the people who used it that I had met, we're always really enthusiastic about it and they felt like it had so many advantages over other software that you can use for running analyses. There were a lot of times before I used R where I might use spreadsheets or some other tool and I would be trying to hack at what really needed to happen. Sometimes I was using multiple tools because an individual tool couldn't really do all what I wanted it to do. But it's like I knew in my mind and yet it wasn't totally fluid, the execution of it. The more exposure I've gotten to R, the more I realize a lot of what I would try to do that way, I can just do within one program, and it can all interlock really fluidly. At first, I was really unconfident. I had a couple of scripts where I had some friends who were better at R, people I worked with who would sit down and help me go through and understand the code and so it felt really silly to ask them the simple question of like, "Okay, but why is a bracket here?" Or "Why would we do this?" But they were fortunately really patient people. Then at some point, our entire department said, really everybody needs to be using this because we need everyone on the same platform. We need consistency in our analyses. We need to be able to co-review each other's analyses as well. We all took an online course together and that helped me feel really a lot more confident because it was walking through each step of what you needed to know, got an opportunity to practice, and then it felt like, "Okay, even if there's things I don't know, "I've made it through introduction, like I've made it through this next module so I do know something." Then once I started to apply it in my work, there would still be points where I was like, "Wait, I don't know how to solve this problem." Then I would talk to a friend, Google something and generally, I knew a lot more than I thought that I did and from that, I suddenly unlocked my ability to produce a whole lot of analyses quickly with the big dataset and also produce a whole lot of data visualizations really quickly using ggplot2. Hi, my name's Carrie and I'm a Research Manager within People Operations at Google.