Writes Aditya I. (4ths)
The Fourths Scholars’ Program for Computing focuses on enriching students with valuable knowledge of data science, enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of data and explore its various applications and benefits in the classroom, the corporate world, and the scientific community. Students at MTS have already – knowingly or unknowingly – applied data science in different contexts; however, this course helped us extend our knowledge and inspired a passion for the subject.
In my first session, my peers and I examined a set of cholera outbreak data and quickly reached the same conclusion that Dr. John Snow came to in 1854: cholera was waterborne, and the widely held assumption of the day that it was airborne was – thanks to data analysis – surely false. This highlighted the power of data and the significance of data science across diverse fields such as medicine, finance, technology, and politics, demonstrating its usefulness in the modern world.
In later sessions, we explored numerous ways to analyse, make sense of and present real world global data, on indicators such as GDP, air pollution, GDP per capita, life expectancy, over a longer time span. This gave us insight into the applications of different graphs and tools. For example, the bar graph proved ideal for comparing categorical and numerical data. This marked our progression into learning advanced data concepts and methods currently used in industry.
I look forward to the remaining sessions working with large data sets.
