UC Berkeley's undergraduate Data Science Major has beennamed No. 1 in the nation by US News. MIT was rated second best, followed by Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. Berkeley's program, part of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, was started five years ago and makes its curriculum available to other schools interested in establishing their own data science programs. Currently, more than 900 Cal undergrads are majoring in data science and another 450 have chosen it as their minor. Over 6,000 UC Berkeley students take a data science course each year.
“Everything we do is for our students and not for acknowledgment, but this is special. We know that we are building an awesome curriculum, developing scalable infrastructure, responding to student demand, and integrating student teams, and every day we see local and global interest in what we are doing, shares Eric Van Dusen, Interim Director of the Data Science Education Program.
Data Science education at Berkeley distinguishes itself as an academic program that empowers all students, regardless of academic discipline or technical background, with the knowledge to become a data scientist."
In addition to the major and minor, Data Science Undergraduate Studies provides various programs and resources to support its student's academic journey such as:
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Data Scholars: Provides spaces where students from many disciplines and backgrounds learn together, develop their skills in data science, and co-create a diverse community.
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Discovery Program: Discovery connects undergraduates with hands-on, team-based opportunities to contribute to cutting-edge data research projects. They get the chance to work with experts, graduates, postdoctoral students, community groups, entrepreneurial ventures, and educational initiatives across UC Berkeley.
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Connectors: A connector course lets students weave together core concepts and approaches from Data 8 with complementary ideas or areas from other fields. Along the way, students gain additional experience, broader insights, or deeper theoretical or computational foundations.
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Modules: Data science modules are short explorations into data science that give students the opportunity to work hands-on with a data set relevant to their course and receive some instruction on the principles of data analysis, statistics, and computing.
The Data Science major is now a part of the new Berkeley Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). This new division has been created to educate the next generation to approach data ethically and masterfully and advance the state of the art in the core of computing and data science. Berkeley’s undergraduate data science program will continue to emphasize increasing the data science literacy of Berkeley students as well as supporting other colleges/universities and even high schools with the implementation of data science curriculum to increase the range and diversity of students being exposed to data science.