New undergraduate program in data science grows rapidly, graduates first student

In Fall 2015, the EECS Department and the Department of Statistics in LSA launched a joint undergraduate program in Data Science. As of Spring of 2016, the program had grown to 79 declared majors, 36 in engineering and 43 in LSA.

The first engineering student to graduate with a degree in data science was Ryan Schrader, a dual data science/computer science major who matriculated in December 2015. Ryan, who has recently begun work as a Software Developer on the Predictive Analytics team at healthcare software firm Epic near Madison, Wisconsin, says that until the announcement of the data science major, he was unsure whether he would be fully prepared to work in the field of data science.

“Through the data science major, I was exposed to statistics courses and capstone projects that served to deepen my understanding of statistical theory and application, which has since proven essential in my ongoing learning and projects post-graduation,” said Ryan. “At Epic, I look forward to using these skills on a daily basis, whether it is exploring and visualizing a new dataset or building and testing new predictive models.”