Teaching Soft Skills in Data Science Curriculum

• Activity Number: 514 - Teaching Data Science: R, Git, and the Undergraduate Curriculum
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, July 31, 2019 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and Data Science Education
• Author(s): Hunter Glanz* and Dennis L Sun and Alexander Dekhtyar
• Companies: California Polytechnic State University and Cal Poly and Google and California Polytechnic State University
• Keywords: data science; soft skills; communication; education

Abstract

Although the exact definition of ”data science” is still in flux, academia and industry seem to agree on a large portion of relevant content: statistics and computer science. But to be a successful data scientist, our students must be able to formulate real-world problems as statistical questions and translate the answers back to the real world. These skills, which include communication and collaboration, are often grouped under the umbrella term ”soft skills”. In this talk, we detail the ways we integrate ”soft skills” training in our data science curriculum, on top of the statistics and computer science coursework.