Data Science is the study of the mathematical and computational methods for extracting meaning from data. It involves the collection, processing, organization, quantitative analysis, visualization and modeling of data. It is interdisciplinary, drawing from the fields of computer science, mathematics, statistics, and information science, among many others. As data plays an increasingly important role in understanding and discovery across a wide range of disciplines, data science provides a set of tools that enable scholars to better analyze and answer important problems in their own field. In this way, data science often serves as a hub to foster collaboration within and across organizations.
Why Consider a Data Science Major?
Data science empowers you to solve important, challenging problems that are otherwise impractical or impossible to solve. These data-centric problems exist everywhere, from science, the arts, business, the humanities and social sciences, engineering and beyond. Today's world is accumulating data at unprecedented rates, the sheer magnitude of which means that the insights, knowledge, and discoveries buried within that data cannot be found through traditional techniques alone. Algorithms to learn from this data have already revolutionized many fields, from speech recognition to computer vision, producing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
The skills you will obtain in the Data Science program will enable you to obtain, process, organize, analyze, visualize and model the troves of data out there. Beyond the intellectual satisfaction of data science work, these skills are in high demand. Data science jobs are among the fastest growing in the country, and data scientists often land interesting, challenging and lucrative jobs directly out of college.