You've survived midterms, written lab reports, and probably pasted survey data into Excel one row at a time. Before we touch a single line of Python — what's the part of your thesis workflow that hurts the most?
Honestly? Every time my advisor wants updated cross-tabs I have to redo everything manually. It takes a whole evening.
That's exactly the loop Python closes. But before we go further, I want a snapshot of where you actually are today — not where you hope to be. Rate yourself on six skills. A 1 on everything is a perfectly honest answer.
I'm an economics major, not a CS student. Is this genuinely for me?
You're already doing the hard part — your research question, your methodology, knowing which numbers matter. Python is just the layer that runs your analysis without clicking through 500 rows. Rate honestly. Day 30 answers show the delta.
Thirty days. One real project: a senior-thesis analysis pipeline. By Day 28 you'll have working Python that takes a raw CSV of survey responses, cleans missing fields, computes cross-tabs by demographic bucket, and returns a summary dict ready for your methodology table.
| Week | Focus | Student framing |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Variables, strings, f-strings, booleans, if/elif | "Your Qualtrics export is a mess. Clean one response at a time." |
| 2 | Lists, loops, dicts, nested structures | "500 survey responses. Loop and count — don't click 500 times." |
| 3 | Functions, defaults, CSV, JSON | "Your advisor wants the analysis rerun with new data every Friday." |
| 4 | Comprehensions, sorting, error handling, capstone | "Ship the pipeline that runs your entire methodology section." |
Every lesson is a short Socratic conversation plus one small coding challenge. Tests tell you immediately what went wrong.
You've survived midterms, written lab reports, and probably pasted survey data into Excel one row at a time. Before we touch a single line of Python — what's the part of your thesis workflow that hurts the most?
Honestly? Every time my advisor wants updated cross-tabs I have to redo everything manually. It takes a whole evening.
That's exactly the loop Python closes. But before we go further, I want a snapshot of where you actually are today — not where you hope to be. Rate yourself on six skills. A 1 on everything is a perfectly honest answer.
I'm an economics major, not a CS student. Is this genuinely for me?
You're already doing the hard part — your research question, your methodology, knowing which numbers matter. Python is just the layer that runs your analysis without clicking through 500 rows. Rate honestly. Day 30 answers show the delta.
Thirty days. One real project: a senior-thesis analysis pipeline. By Day 28 you'll have working Python that takes a raw CSV of survey responses, cleans missing fields, computes cross-tabs by demographic bucket, and returns a summary dict ready for your methodology table.
| Week | Focus | Student framing |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Variables, strings, f-strings, booleans, if/elif | "Your Qualtrics export is a mess. Clean one response at a time." |
| 2 | Lists, loops, dicts, nested structures | "500 survey responses. Loop and count — don't click 500 times." |
| 3 | Functions, defaults, CSV, JSON | "Your advisor wants the analysis rerun with new data every Friday." |
| 4 | Comprehensions, sorting, error handling, capstone | "Ship the pipeline that runs your entire methodology section." |
Every lesson is a short Socratic conversation plus one small coding challenge. Tests tell you immediately what went wrong.
