From Gnip
The Need for a Data Science Master’s Program
By Elaine Ellis
Interview with AnnaLee Saxenian, the dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Information
1. Why create a master’s program specifically for data scientists?
There is huge demand for people who can work with data, at large as well as small scales, using the new tools and technologies that are becoming available for data storage, analytics, and visualization. While data science has been pioneered by technology companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, we believe that every organization today (large and small, profit and non-profit, in every industry) has new sources of data that it can use to inform decision making and to develop new products and services....
2. Data scientist is a new career path. What are the advantages of receiving formal training through a program such as Berkeley’s School of Information versus real-world experience?
...One of the advantages of a master’s degree program like the Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) at Berkeley is that our faculty has built a complete curriculum from the ground up–designing both the individual courses we think are essential to practicing data scientists as well as building the dependencies between the courses so that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. The curriculum covers the full life cycle of data science. We offer courses devoted to research design, data storage and retrieval, statistical analysis, machine learning, data visualization and communication, data privacy and ethics, field experiments, and scaling and parallelism. In addition, we require that students gain experience working in teams. In short, formal education like the MIDS program offers comprehensive exposure to the field of data science....