What is Data Science?
Data science, a term that Google brought into prominence, is revolutionizing organizations. The amount of data being gathered and generated by society is increasing at astronomical rates. By 2020, it is expected that 1.7 MB of data will be generated every second for every human on the planet. The total amount of data is expected to be around 44 trillion gigabytes. This has led to the development of new techniques to store, harness and generate meaningful intelligence that power modern science and industry.
According to Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, “The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.”
Why Major in Data Science?
. Skills include machine learning, modeling, optimization, data visualization, and artificial intelligence are particularly valued.
According to LinkedIn’s 2017 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report, . Data scientists remain in demand because of current labor shortages, the challenge of organizing data, and the need for data scientists outside of the tech industry.
, data scientist has been selected as the best job in America for the fourth year in a row. Glassdoor reports a median base salary of $108,000. Additionally, CareerCast.com reported data scientist as one of the toughest jobs to fill and .
Why Major in Data Science at Rose-Hulman?
According to the National Academy of Sciences, a student hoping to start a career as a data scientist needs to be exposed to topics in mathematics (courses on linear algebra, calculus, and modeling), statistics (introductory statistics, probability, applied statistics), and computer science (programming, database systems, data structures, distributed systems, machine learning and deep learning).
The new Data Science Major at Rose-Hulman is a joint offering of the Computer Science & Software Engineering and Mathematics Departments. There are multiple faculty within each department whose research expertise and industry experiences falls in this interdisciplinary area. This unique offering will provide our students an in-depth exposure to data engineering, data analysis and data intelligence. Our analysis also shows that our students will gain more experience in data engineering, artificial intelligence and machine learning when compared to other programs.