Hello, to-be-political scientists! As you may already know, in the last 20 years, political science research has come to increasingly rely on quantitative and formal methods. To help our graduate students to be better prepared for this trend, the department has designed Math Camp for every incoming Ph.D. student to first review/learn some basic underlying mathematical concepts before starting the methods sequence (POL211-213, 215) in the Fall quarter.
Here is an overview of Math Camp and the methods sequence. In Math Camp, Ryan will cover topics such as mathematical objects and reasoning, basics of calculus, optimization, linear algebra, and the introduction of basic computer programming (mostly R). In method sequences, you will be taught more about statistics, how to interpret results from different types of linear regression models, visualizations (mostly in R), and most importantly, how to incorporate this skill set into your own research of interests.
We do understand that some of you might have not been in a math class in a while and maybe feel a bit nervous about the incoming quantitative training. To ease your concerns, we have prepared some bridge materials to hopefully navigate you to the math world more smoothly. This website is created as a “resource repository” for your first two years in the program. You are NOT required to go over all the materials we provide on this website before the program starts, so don’t worry! This website aims to help students who would like to have reliable resources to self-learn some topics and skills you are interested in developing.
Since we have provided a variety of materials we think may be useful for your early Ph.D. journey, some of you might feel a bit lost when deciding which topics should be prioritized. Don’t worry! Here is a suggested timeline and check box for you to incorporate these materials into your summer plan. Again, this is NOT a requirement! You are more than welcome to pick any topic you are interested in the most to start with or just utilize this website as your reference after school starts.
Before the Math Camp (July-August)
During the Math Camp (August-September)
After the Math Camp - First Two Weeks of the Fall Quarter
*** Just a reminder, Sections I-VI are not in order, per se. It is just a list to lay out different topics we would like you to start to get familiar with.
Besides taking POL211 in the first quarter, you will also have to take another two seminars in which you will be assigned to read many journal articles that are heavily quantitative based. For those who have little experience in reading quantitative articles before, we recommend you go over this blog post from Prof. Steven Miller: Reading a Regression Table: A Guide for Students. We hope this will help you get through substantive seminars more smoothly during your first quarter.
In the methods sequence, most of your assignments will require you to use R to do the computation or analysis. R is a very useful computational tool and allows you to generate cool visualizations. Most importantly, R is open-source, which means it is free and a lot of brilliant coders share their codes online that you can use. Here are the steps for you to download R and RStudio if you have never used them before:
Download & Install R
*To install: Doubleclick on the downloaded file (check your Downloads folder if you cannot see it directly). Click yes through all the prompts to install like any other program.
Download & Install R Studio
We are planning to apply for “DataCamp for Classrooms” to allow grad students to have a period of 6 months of free access to most of the contents on DataCamp. We will inform you about how to get free access after we all set up. DataCamp has a variety of R courses, including basic R programming skills, how to do data wrangling and summarizing in R, how to apply different regression models in R, how to generate graphs in R, etc. Here are some recommended courses for you to get started (these courses were also assigned in Rachel’s POL281):
Meanwhile, we also collect some online resources that we think are handy to have around during quarters. Remember, whenever you have questions regarding R, Google will have answers to your questions 99% of the time!
Since for most assignments in the methods sequence, the write-up may have to be done in LaTeX and submitted as a pdf, we provide an installation guide and short tutorials here for your future reference. Here is a brief introduction to what is LaTeX.
If you prefer not to download the LaTeX compiler and editor to your laptop, you can use Overleaf, which is an online LaTeX editor that is very easy to use and work on projects with multiple collaborators. It also provides many templates for you to choose from. Here is a brief introduction video of how to use Overleaf.
*** I’d like to thank Alice, Forrest, Haley, Jill, Julian, Paige, and Patrick for kindly sharing their thoughts and brilliant ideas and Amber and Ryan for giving wonderful feedback!