Speaker
Description
While coursework provides undergraduate data science students
with some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the rich experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have limited exposure to team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encountered outside of school. The DSC-WAV program is a data
science workforce development project in which teams of undergraduate sophomores and juniors work with a local non-profit organization on a data-focused problem. To help students develop a sense of agency and improve confidence in their technical and non-technical data science skills, the project promotes a team-based approach to data science, adopting several processes and tools intended to facilitate this collaboration. Evidence from the project evaluation, including participant survey and interview data, shows the degree to which the project has successfully engaged students in team-based data science, and how the project changed the students’ perceptions of their technical and non-technical skills. The project also supports development of a data science workforce pipeline by helping community colleges establish data science programs and align with 4-year institutions in order to facilitate student transfer as data science majors.
