MSDM Boot Camp

Basic Tools and Concepts to Study before First Semester

This page provides students with study materials before students start their first semester at the MSDM Program.

Published

November 3, 2025

Introduction

This Boot Camp is designed to help you hit the ground running in your first semester of the MSDM program.
You’ll benefit the most if either of the following is true:

You’re not yet comfortable with advanced Excel features (e.g., PivotTables/PivotCharts, XLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH, basic data cleaning and charting).
You haven’t taken a statistics course that used R (or it’s been a while and you’d like a refresher).

Who should do this?
If you checked one (or both) of the items above, complete the first two Excel tutorials and the first R tutorial below before the semester begins. These are free through LinkedIn Learning when you sign in via MyCPP.

How to use this page

Start with Excel Skills (tutorials #1–2).
Do R Programming and Statistics (tutorial #1).
If time allows, explore the additional tutorials for deeper practice.

1 Spreadsheet Skills

You don’t need to finish them all, but try to finish the first two tutorials at LinkedIn Learning, which you can use for free of charge when you log into MyCPP at Cal Poly Pomona.

2 R Programming and Statistics

If your undergraduate majors didn’t require you to take statistics, then you should consider taking the following Boot Camp materials. You will be exposed to not only statistics but also R and RStudio, the primary coding based tool you will use in the MSDM Program. There is a quite steep learning curve in any programming language. Thus, you are strongly recommended to learn some basics before your first semester.