Houghton College has made progress on the proposed new data science major this semester, which opened up new opportunities for current students. Internships, job opportunities, and new classes in data science are already available for students.
Alumna Carmen McKell, said of data science, it is a “new field designed to fill the demand for data-savvy professionals in virtually every part of the economy.” Ken Bates, department chair of business and economics, said managing and marketing cannot be done properly, “unless we can somehow harness the streams of information flowing at us all the time,” which is a good visual for what data science is about.
According to Bates, the curriculum is in progress. Originally, he said, curriculum had a lot of computer science courses, but Bates, McKell, and Garfield Fisher, McKell’s husband, who are involved in creating the curriculum, are worried about excluding communication, business, and psychology majors who do not want to take all the computer science classes. Now they are considering a more interdisciplinary approach, and perhaps adding several tracks in the major. In conjunction with a liberal arts education, McKell said, the data science major will prepare students “to communicate complicated findings to a wide range of people in several different ways such as written text, or infographics, as visual stories or data dashboards.”
McKell and Fisher will be on campus Dec. 11-12 to work further on the curriculum with faculty and meet with students. Bates aims to have the curriculum sent to Albany, New York for the state’s approval sometime early next semester.
Bates does not expect a new hire in data science. However, he said, because of the pending major as the business department searches for one finance and one accounting faculty, they will likely favor candidates with some expertise in data science.
As the data science curriculum progresses, the college is already offering two new classes: Data Science Senior Seminar during the spring semester and Social Media Marketing and Data Analytics during Mayterm. The one credit hour spring class will “help expose them [current seniors] to some aspect of data science right away so they hit the ground running with a little more knowledge about the industry,” said Bates. Glen Avery, instructional technology librarian, is the coordinator of the course. The course will likely involve guest speakers on various topics in the course. Taught by alumnus Shane Fraser, The four credit Mayterm class will expose students to everything social media and look at how organizations are, and can use data gathered from social media.
Kim Pool, director of VOCA, said the three branches of the proposed data science major, are social good, learning analytics, and sports analytics. Social good is concerned with humanitarian, nonprofit, and government efforts; learning involves higher education such as admissions or alumni relations; sports will involve Houghton’s own sporting data, possible connections with the Buffalo Bills and Sabres, and concussion analysis of athletes. Along with this, Pool anticipates a new concussion lab in the KPFH.
In October, Pool attended the data science Strata Hadoop Conference in New York City. McKell and Fisher, who own BaseMetrics, an advanced analytics and visualization company based out of Ottawa, Canada, also attended the conference. Amanda Stent, alumna and principal research scientist at Yahoo Labs met with Pool and McKell at the conference, who shared some of data work at Yahoo. McKell said, “Much of the Strata conference was devoted to the best practices in data science, with presentations from some of the worlds’ leading data scientists on to to make data work in business, health, finance, media, fashion, retail and government.”
Pool, McKell, and Fisher met with employers such as: SAS, a business analysis company, Microsoft, RapidMiner, Bloomberg, and Bell Canada to inquire about data science internships for Houghton College students. They also met with Stefan Heeke, CEO of SumAll, a data and impact analytics company, who has a nonprofit organization branch. According to Pool, they also discussed creating a fellowship in New York City for Houghton students “Students would bring their own research data and be given guidance and instruction on analytics, dashboard visualization and policy implementation,” she said “It would be a great experiential learning opportunity for students interested in applying data science to a humanitarian effort.” McKell and Fisher also discussed opportunities to use business’s data software software in classes within the major.
Bates said there is no other Christian college offering a data science major. He hopes for Houghton to be the first, or among the first, especially from a liberal arts perspective.
Concerning the application of the major in the workplace, McKell said “Let’s just say, there is not a job that can’t be enhanced with the understanding and use of data.” Bates said, “Right away there are job opportunities for our students.” He adds the VOCA office is already lining up contacts.
Bates said he asked employers, “if they were open at all to entry level liberal arts students and they all said absolutely ‘yes!’ They prefer to hire those kinds of students, our kinds of students, as opposed to someone who’s finished a masters degree in data science.”