After a long period of deliberation, Houghton may well add a data science program to its educational offerings in the near future.
A key player in initiating data science at Houghton is alumna Carmen McKell, a data science professional who graduated from Houghton in 1987 with a degree in psychology. After graduation, McKell went on to attain a masters degree in statistics and applied research at the University of New Brunswick as well as another Masters in psychology. McKell has over twenty years of experience working in the field of data science. She is the co-founder and president of BaseMetrics which, according to its website, is “a full service Predictive Analytics and Software Development enterprise.” BaseMetrics is centered in Ontario, Canada, with offices in the United States, Mexico, and India.
McKell approached the President’s office last fall with the proposal to initiate a data science program at Houghton. Since that time, her company, BaseMetrics, has produced a report analyzing the demand and Houghton’s ability to offer the program. According to Paul Young, professor of psychology, the results were positive and the program is now being in “the process of deciding to whether to go ahead.”
What is data science? According to Young, the modern age is awash in data but “our ability to collect data has outpaced our ability to understand it.” The discipline of data science, then, has formed in recent decades to “make sense” of the large amounts of data. The meanings that are then derived from sets of data could be applicable to nearly every field of study. For instance, according to Wei Hu, professor of computer science, it is not unrealistic that an analysis of tweets on the social media site, Twitter, could generate information about the general health of a community–thereby providing valuable information to the field of healthcare.
To Hu, this is what makes data science an “exciting” field of study to introduce at Houghton in particular. “Data science is a connector that connects different disciplines together, which makes it very powerful at a liberal arts college,” said Hu. At its core, said Hu, the field is based in a thorough understanding of computer science and statistics, but it bleeds into a number of the disciplines already offered at Houghton: business, the sciences, linguistics, economics, political science, international development, and others.
Additionally, though data can provide seemingly innumerable insights to various disciplines, the use and analysis of data often involves ethical questions. Hu said that this is also what makes it a “powerful” program to add at Houghton, an institution that regularly engages in ethics.
This was confirmed by Dean Linda Mills Woolsey who said in an email, “We have a proposed curriculum and are working on a business plan…We hope to pilot a course or two next year, and, if Data Science emerges as a priority, to bring it to the faculty for approval next year.”
Though “the program is still far from settled,” according to Young, it would most likely involve a core in computer science and statistics from which students would apply into a content area (such as business, political science, etc.), operating in much the same way as the intercultural studies major in which students are required to take on a second major.