Essential Skills to Learn Before Starting Your Research Project

A big benefit of doing a research project is being able to learn technical skills as you go along. But at Polygence, we've helped over 4000 students complete research projects in all kinds of fields and we've noticed that knowing skills before you start your project can help you go even deeper into your analysis. In this article, we'll share essential skills to learn and resources for how best to learn these skills.

Top Skills to Learn Before Doing Research

1. Microsoft Excel

Excel is a spreadsheet software used for data organization, analysis, and visualization. Finance projects specifically involve a lot of accounting and financial data. Excel spreadsheets can help you organize that financial data to understand profits and how a company is growing over time. This YouTube playlist from Kenji Explains gives great Excel tutorials specifically for finance and business applications. It is useful for all research project topics!

2. AutoCAD

AutoCAD is a software used to create precise 2D and 3D drawings and models AutoCAD offers a great solution to visualize your designs and build them up over time. The AutoCAD website itself also offers an excellent quick start guide for beginners. It is useful for engineering design projects, and architecture projects.

3. ChatGPT

As an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT is great for research and creating research paper outlines as long as you're not using ChatGPT to generate full essays for you. If you'd like to learn more about using ChatGPT for research, check out our article Leveraging ChatGPT to Elevate Your High School Research Paper. If you want to see how professionals use ChatGPT in their work, we highly recommend Every's channel and their videos! It is useful for any research project!

4. Python

Python is a coding language known for its readability and versatility. You can use Python for data analysis and visualization, building machine learning models and algorithms, and creating websites and apps. It is a great place to start is the Introduction to Computer Science course on Khan Academy. It is useful for data analysis projects, coding projects, video game design, app development. Check out our blog article on Polygence alumni Arul and how he used Python code to calculate the brightness of nearby galaxies!

5. Zotero

A free, open-source tool that helps you organize, cite, and annotate sources for your research. The technical details of citations can often be confusing and it can be very useful to have a software to help you. Zotero provides a quickstart guide on their own website. It is useful for any research paper.

6. SPSS and R

SPSS and R are used for data management, statistical analysis, and survey analysis. Both SPSS and R are great tools for cleaning up data, performing basic statistics, and also advanced statistical procedures such as factor analysis and cluster analysis. YouTube offers tutorials for learning SPSS, and Codeacademy also has free courses on learning R. It is useful for social science research, government and education research, business projects, and STEM projects.

7. PowerPoint

PowerPoint allows you to make slide presentations and pitch decks. When you've completed your research project it's important to then showcase your findings. A PowerPoint presentation is a common way to showcase your work and make your research come to life. This YouTube video by Kevin Stratvert should be a great place to start for most beginners. It is useful for any kind of research project!

8. Google Scholar

A web search engine where you can search a database of scholarly literature. Google Scholar is a great tool for students who are in the preliminary phase of their research project and are looking for interesting articles or papers to help guide or support their arguments. Sam Houston State University provides a simple guide to using Google Scholar. It is useful for all research projects.

9. Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization software that allows you to turn data into charts and dashboards. Tableau allows for creative data visualizations and can also allow you to find trends and insights in your data. YouTube creator sqlbelle has a great playlist for learning Tableau with over 100 videos! It is useful for any kind of research project!

Conclusion

Doing a Polygence project can also help you to gain and build a lot of these skills while also helping you formulate a compelling research project that you'll be proud of. Further, you won't have to tackle this project alone! Polygence has 3000+ PhD/expert mentors in all kinds of fields.