Methods Camp
UT Austin, Department of Government
Class schedule
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Mon, Aug. 18 | 1:00 PM - 5:30 PM | RLP 2.606 |
| Tue, Aug. 19 | 1:00 PM - 5:30 PM | RLP 2.606 |
| Wed, Aug. 20 | 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM | RLP1.302D |
| 1:00 PM - 4:30 PM | BAT 5.108 | |
| Thu, Aug. 21 | 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM | RLP 3.106 |
| 1:00 AM - 4:30 PM | RLP 3.106 |
We’ll take short breaks periodically during the morning and afternoon sessions as needed.
Description
Welcome to Introduction to Methods for Political Science, aka “Methods Camp”! Methods Camp is designed to give everyone a chance to brush up on some skills in preparation for the introductory Statistics and Formal Theory courses. The other goal of Methods Camp is to allow you to get to know your cohort. We hope that matrix algebra and the chain rule will still prove to be good bonding exercises!
As you can see from the above schedule, we’ll be meeting on Monday, August 18th, through Thursday, August 21st. Classes at UT begin the start of the following week on Monday, August 25th. Below is a tentative schedule outlining what will be covered in the class, although we may rearrange things if we find we’re going too slowly or too quickly through the material.
Course outline
1 Monday afternoon: Intro to R
- Introductions
- R and RStudio: basics
- Objects (vectors, matrices, data frames, etc.)
- Basic functions (
mean(),length(), etc.) - Packages: installation and loading (including the tidyverse)
2 Monday afternoon: Tidy data analysis I
- Tidy data
- Data wrangling with dplyr
- Data visualization basics with
ggplot2
3 Tuesday morning: Functions
- Definitions
- Functions in R
- Common types of functions
- Logarithms and exponents
- Composite functions
4 Tuesday afternoon: Calculus
- Derivatives
- Optimization
- Integrals
5 Wednesday morning: Matrices
- Matrices
- Systems of linear equations
- Matrix operations (multiplication, transpose, inverse, determinant)
- Solving systems of linear equations in matrix form (and why that’s cool)
- Introduction to OLS
6 Wednesday afternoon: Tidy data analysis II
- Loading data in different formats (.csv, R, Excel, Stata, SPSS)
- Recoding values (
if_else(),case_when()) - Handling missing values
- Pivoting data
- Merging data
- Plotting extensions (trend graphs, facets, customization)
7 Thursday morning: Probability
- Probability: basic concepts
- Random variables, probability distributions, and their properties
- Common probability distributions
8 Thursday afternoon: Statistics and simulations
- Statistics: basic concepts
- Random sampling and loops in R
- Simulation example: bootstrapping
9 Thursday afternoon: Wrap-up
- Project management fundamentals
- Self-study resources and materials
- Other software (Overleaf, Zotero, etc.)
- Methods resources at UT
Contact info
If you have any questions during or outside of the methods camp, you can contact us via email. Or if you are curious about our research, you can also check out our respective websites and Twitter accounts (or should we say X…):
- Meiying Xu:
- Joel Yew:
Acknowledgements
We thank previous Methods Camp instructors for their accumulated experience and materials, upon which we have based ours upon. UT Gov Prof. Max Goplerud gave us amazing feedback for this iteration of Methods Camp (2025). All errors remain our own (and will hopefully be fixed with your help!).