Preface#
This book has been designed to cater to students with a spectrum of skill levels - low, moderate, or advanced - ensuring that no one feels overwhelmed or under-stimulated.
Your journey through this book will be paced with milestones – “pacesetters” – to help you stay on track with your learning objectives.
We believe in transparency, which is why we’re providing a grading rubric from the get-go. This tool lets you understand how you’ll be assessed and eliminates any surprises.
Learning is an emotional journey. You might experience moments of anxiety, boredom, or – ideally – a state known as “flow”. Flow is a psychological concept describing a state of optimal engagement and enjoyment that occurs when your skill level and the challenges you face are well balanced.
Our goal is to begin with low challenge levels and increase these gradually each week. We’ll provide material suited to different skill levels at each challenge level, equipping you with the tools to stay in the “flow” zone.
The best way we can achieve this is through regular feedback. To that end, we ask that you submit your responses to weekly tasks by 11:59PM every Monday.
Prerequisites: This isn’t a statistics class, but some basic understanding of summary estimates like mean, standard deviation, and percentile will be helpful.
While the sessions revolve around concepts applicable to Stata Programming, the knowledge you gain here can also be applied to Python, R, SAS, SPSS, or other statistical computing languages. However, the class Hub’s topics are organized technically, specific to Stata or this class.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT, will be an important tool to boost your learning speed, problem-solving ability, and to assist with challenges, including timely homework submissions.
Rest assured, we’ll continue to hold office hours, both in-person and via Zoom, to provide the human touch and support your learning journey.
We look forward to meeting you, guiding you, learning from you, and exploring Stata Programming together!
Your teaching team,
East Baltimore
Spring 2024