Michael Plenty wrote:

> My company uses SPSS, as most undergraduate programs and companies,
> however, now that I'm beginning the thinking process for graduate school, most
> schools, in particular Northwestern, UChicago, and Yale, all recommend I
> become familiar with Stata and R.
>
> Are there any major differences between the three programs?

Yes.  R is object-oriented, which has its good and bad points.  It's
annoying if you just want regression output, because you have to poke
the output object to make it squeak.  It's very fabulous if you want to
do even basic programming, because you can grab a piece of one object
and feed it to a custom function you've written, which will then output
another object.  Woo!

I haven't touched SPSS in donkey's years, but my *sense* is (and by
reputation) it's not as extensible as R or Stata.  However, this could
also be completely false.  But I'll go ahead and say it in the hopes
that if I'm wrong, some good geek will be so incensed by my statement of
a falsehood that (s)he will correct me.

> If so, what? and what resources are out there to help me adjust?

There are scads of good books / web pages for both.  Also, your
colleagues and professors.  People are better than books.

If you're thinking of being a normally-numerate to somewhat-high-tech
political scientist, you can expect that:

(1)  You might well be able to do a fair chunk of your work in SPSS.
(2)  You will need routines (estimators, corrections) that SPSS doesn't
      have, and probably sooner rather than later.
(3)  At that point, you need to turn to the right tool for the job.
      Maybe it'll be R or Stata, or a routine written for one or the
      other.  Or maybe it will be any of various pieces of boutique
      software.
(4)  You're going to end up learning at least the basics of R and Stata.
      And several pieces of boutique software relevant to your
      dissertation research.  This is not a matter of choice except
      insofar as you choose to be in graduate school.  Learning these
      tools will be imposed on you by people who insist that you use the
      right tool for the job, when those right tools are scattered across
      different programs and operating systems.  This is normal.
      Resistance to this idea is also normal, but, well, resistance is
      futile.

I guess what I mean is that you don't need to worry about which is best
and which you should learn.  You win the jackpot -- you get to learn
them all.

Best,

Jim Battista
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