Congratulations and welcome to the 2024 cohort of the MFRE program at UBC. We are excited to have you join us and look forward to meeting you in person. As you know, the MFRE program is a unique program that combines economics, policy, and business with a focus on food and resource economics. We are confident that you will find the program both challenging and rewarding.
We look forward to meeting you in person and wish you all the best as you begin your studies at UBC. But before we do, this repository contains some important information that you should review before you arrive for the summer boot camp in August.
As you know, the boot camp will cover the basics of micro to start and then move to the coding and data analysis component. This repository is designed to help you prepare for the boot camp and to provide you with some resources that you can use to get up to speed on the basics.
Many of you come from different backgrounds and have different levels of experience with coding. This is why even though you are not expected to, we highly recommend that you enroll in CS50 before you arrive. This is an online course that's basically Harvard's introduction to computer science which runs throughout a typical semester and is updated every year. It's a great course and will give you a solid foundation in computer science and programming. You can also go through R for Applied Economics: A Beginner’s Guide. This is a great resource that will give you a good foundation in R programming.
This welcome package is designed as a distillation of the most important concepts that are covered in CS50 with extensions for applications in data manipulation. It is not a replacement for the course but it will give you a good head start and cover the basics that you will need for the boot camp.
After setting up your GitHub account and going through the introductory video, you will go through R and Python Material. You are encouraged to go trhough the Jupyter notebooks first before the Rmd files. In the notebooks, you will find exercises and assignments to reinforce your understanding. Try to answer them, and if you encounter errors, attempt to troubleshoot them yourself. Otherwise, note your questions; we will review them at the beginning of the summer program.
Note that there will be a placement quiz on these Notebooks on the first day of the summer program.
For those of you who are already familiar with git and GitHub, feel free to make a fork of this repository and clone it to your local machine and use whatever IDE you are comfortable with. For those of you who are not familiar with git, please use the series of tutorials below to get started with your first IDE or integrated development environment.
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Go to GitHub and create an account using your UBC email address.
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(Optional, can be done later on) Once you have created an account, go to GitHub Education and request a student developer pack. This will give you access to a number of tools and resources that you can use to get started.
Update You might not be able to get the student developer pack just yet as you don't have your student ID. But you can still create an account and start using GitHub.
Happy coding!