IT·Science Talk

Pharmacy student wanting to learn Python for data: where do I actually start?

I'm a pharmacy student in Seoul and I keep running into situations where I need to handle data: dose calculations across many patients, cleaning spreadsheets from lab work, and simple statistics for a research project. Excel is starting to feel like the wrong tool.

I've done a couple of free intro courses, so I know loops and lists. What I'm missing is the bridge to real work. Is pandas the right next step? Should I learn R instead since a lot of biostatistics papers use it? And is a Jupyter notebook enough or should I set up a proper environment from the start?

Any concrete roadmap from people who've done this would be great. I learn best from projects, not from lectures.