Future Data Science Major? When Netflix offers you what-to-watch-next recommendations: that’s data science. When Siri answers you? Data science. Self-driving cars? You guessed it. In today’s ever-evolving world, there’s no question that people who can work with data are and always will be in high demand. Set yourself apart with the distinctive kind of data science that Siena offers at a bachelor’s degree level.
If you have an interest in math, science, or investigation, Siena's data science major is right up your alley. Companies in every field need employees with the technical know-how to transform all that data into meaningful information. In fact, IBM predicts that by 2020, the number of jobs for all U.S. data professionals will increase to 2,720,000!
At Siena, you’ll develop a mastery of data mathematics, statistics and programming. You’ll get the hands-on training and experience in finding patterns, cleaning data and using it to make decisions, and you’ll graduate as a data scientist.
The data science programs we offer include:
So now you see why data science, but here’s why data science at Siena. For starters, Siena is the only college in New York State’s Capital Region to offer a bachelor’s degree in data science.
Data science skills are applicable across all fields. That’s why at Siena, you can follow a purely data science track or choose our applied track. In the latter, you can study your passion—say, engineering or English—alongside data science, learning how it can all tie together.
Our undergraduate data science program is an extension of our liberal arts tradition. We challenge Saints morally to go beyond asking what and how to better understand why. We like to say that behind every smart decision is a data scientist. But behind every smart, ethical decision is a Saint.
Not only are the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and Verizon looking for data scientists, they know what skills they want—so we asked them directly to help us build our curriculum. That’s value.
It’s our job to equip you with the tools you need to do your best here. To that end, all incoming data science students receive a free Raspberry Pi—a small computer that helps students learn how to code.
Spencer Tibbitts '20 and Ben Ellsworth '20 worked with player tracking data from the NBA to measure fatigue. They were invited to submit a paper to the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference where they saw sports luminaries and analytic gurus, including Nate Silver, Alex Rodriguez, and noted Chicago-sports enthusiast President Barack Obama.
Sara Mahar '17 is currently pursuing an MS in the Data Science program at the University of San Francisco. While at Siena, she wrote a set of analysis tools to work with federal data on the homeless to make it easier for data scientists to help those who provide care use their resources most efficiently. She published a paper on this work in 2017.
Dan Loman worked on sports analytics for his senior year capstone project in Physics. This propelled him to enroll in the Data Science program at the University of San Francisco where he earned an MS. In 2017, he worked for the NBA Phoenix Suns as a Basketball Operations Analyst Intern. He is currently a data science engineer for Acuitas Health LLC in Troy, NY.
