Data Science

We live in a world increasingly driven by data. Data science is a rapidly expanding, multidisciplinary field that draws on statistics, computer science and math, with applications in a wide variety of academic disciplines and industries. We extract meaning from data to learn more about the world and society.

The overarching goal of the minor is to allow students to complement their discipline-specific skills and knowledge with a deeper understanding of how to analyze and extract meaning from data to learn more about the world, society and their discipline. We wish to prepare students to be excellent data analysts in their major disciplines and to be prepared to effectively work with data after graduation.

We have identified a set of pedagogical goals for the minor, reflected in the following set of core competencies:

• Collect and analyze data in a reproducible and ethically responsible manner
• Obtain data through searching, scraping, mining or experimental methods
• Parse, transform and generate wide-ranging data sets for analysis
• Statistically analyze data to summarize, draw inferences and make predictions
• Identify patterns and relationships in datasets using visualization and algorithms
• Communicate data methods and conclusions to diverse audiences