Skip to main content
A picture of eye glasses sitting on a laptop screen filled with code

Five courses are required to fulfill the minor. Students can choose data science electives from more than 20 departments both inside and outside the College.

A multidisciplinary data science minor, based in the College but open to all undergraduates, will introduce students to methods and applications that are used in basic and applied sciences, the humanities, social sciences and other disciplines.

The department of statistics and operations research, better known as STOR, introduced the minor this fall. It is an important component of the soon-to-launch data science initiative, a pan-University effort.

When people hear “data science,” they might think of tech jobs: programming the algorithms that generate the ads that pop up on social media or the statistical analysis used to predict online behavior. But data science is applicable to a wide variety of social science and humanistic fields where numbers-crunching, analysis and data interpretation are required.

“So many jobs these days involve working with data of some form, and new hires are increasingly expected to know how to draw insights from it,” said Mariana Olvera-Cravioto, associate professor in STOR who is leading the new minor.

To minor in data science, a student will take five courses in all. Three of the courses fulfill core requirements: Data and Computational Thinking; Data and Statistical Thinking; and Data, Culture and Society. Students will also take two elective courses, selecting among dozens of offerings from more than 20 departments. Most of the electives are in College departments, but the Gillings School of Global Public Health, the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and Kenan-Flagler Business School also have elective courses in the minor.

Learn more at datascience-college.unc.edu.


Published in the Fall 2021 issue | The Scoop

Read More

Thomas Wadden pictured in a black and white 1976 class photo

New gift marks the importance of support for clinical psychology graduate students

As the No. 2 ranked clinical psychology graduate program (U.S….

Hakeem Smith pictured standing outside of an Amazon fulfillment site with the sign reading in Czech foreign language

The global problem-solver

Working for Amazon in Prague, Hakeem Smith uses analytical skills…

UNC Student Body President, Lamar Richards, greets students at the New Student Convocation held at Kenan Stadium on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Monday August 16, 2021. Executive director of the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship, Bernard Bell, was the featured speaker.

Student Body President named Presidential Fellow

Lamar Richards, a UNC junior and student body president, has…

Comments are closed.