Data Science
Application Domain Courses
While data science resides at the intersection of the technical fields of computer science, mathematics, and statistics, domain knowledge in an applied area of study is an essential component for the practicing professional. If data science is the process of extracting meaning from data, we need to know what meaning is! The technical courses provide the tools to work with data and to create models from the data. The domain knowledge courses help one to understand what it is we are looking at -- the meaning . What do our results give us and are they meaningful?
Augustana’s liberal arts environment provides an excellent opportunity to combine the technical field of data science with other fields of study in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. The data science major has been designed with the application domain in mind; the application domain courses outlined above are examples; courses from other departments not listed above can also be included in the program with department approval (or some other TBD process).
Double Majors
While designed to be a stand-alone major with the inclusion of application domain courses, the requirements for the data science major overlap nicely with those from mathematics and from computer science. A double major with data science in either of those areas will result in a set of skills that are in high demand in today’s job market. Pairing the data science major with a major in business administration, economics, and biology are also in-demand combinations.
Data science combined with other majors should also be obtainable in a four-year plan, depending on the required course overlaps.
Data Science Minor
While the data science major is highly technical, the data science minor is more accessible to those with limited time to complete the required course sequence. The minor includes exposure to two high-level data science programming languages, statistics, data analytics and modeling techniques, and data visualization techniques.