One more down!

Well, I completed DataCamp’s “Sampling in R” course this evening. That’s one more down!

As I build momentum in completing these courses, details that I had either forgotten or wasn’t originally exposed to in my work with R during my Graduate program are starting to take hold.

Because R is a constantly-evolving programming language — there are 22,240 contributed packages on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), as of March 19, 2025 — it’s impossible to be familiar with “everything.”

It is, feasible, however, to be a “journeyman” of sorts, and either know enough about most aspects of the language to adhere to a corollary of the Pareto Principle and complete 80% of your tasks using 20% of the available features — or, to put it another way, to derive 80% of your results from 20% of your effort.

This puts me at the 75% benchmark for completing the “Associate Data Scientist in R” track.

To be honest, had I not been laid off, I might not have been motivated to plow through this program. So, it’s been a mixed blessing.