Major: Data Science

Domain Emphasis: Applied Math, Modeling, & OptimizationThao Vo

Kylie, who came to the US from Vietnam at age 16, reflects on how the data science major helped her find her community at Berkeley. She will begin the Berkeley Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) in Fall 2019.

To be here at Berkeley and graduate with a data science major, I had to suffer through a lot of difficulties. I came to the US. when I was 16 from Vietnam. I did not know what my goals were and I did not even think about who I wanted to be in the future. Language barriers and culture differences prevented me from thinking big. I decided to go to a community college after two years in high school and majored in mathematics, but I still was not sure that was the right major for me. Being able to transfer to UCB gave me a lot of motivation to try harder and figure out what I really wanted to do. After my first semester here, I started to realize that math was not right for me. Doing proofs everyday was no longer fun. I went to talk to a few advisors from different colleges, but I still did not know which major would fit me best.

On my second semester, I wanted to try some other classes outside of the major, and I was really into Data 8. I started to research about data science to learn more about the field. I thought that wasn’t enough, so I decided to study abroad in Hong Kong to learn about machine learning, which is an important part of learning data science. I was able to learn a lot from my PhD supervisor and realized that data science is something that I should do. However, we didn’t have a data science at that time, so I decided to stay for one more semester to be able to declare the major.

I am proud to be the first graduating cohort of data science majors at UC Berkeley.

I think that for the past two years that I have spent at Berkeley, this is first time that really feel like I did something to make myself happy.

I used to think that I did not belong here, and sometimes I thought that I couldn’t try anymore. Now, I am thankful I was able to find my interest and have a much more clear career path in data science.