In the summer of 2022, midd.data launched a new credit-bearing “Introduction to Data” summer course designed to provide students from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented in data science with new opportunities to learn about and participate in the field.
Jeff Sawyer from The Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) shares information about career opportunities in the technology and data, and how to work with CCI to explore.
Dr. Hang Du of Middlebury’s Chinese Department has for over a decade been building and analyzing a database of spoken Chinese to understand how student’s studying abroad learn Chinese. We checked in with her to see how she is doing this work, what she has learned, and what advice she has for others embarking on this type of study.
This winter term five faculty colleagues from Math, Art History, Biology, Economics, and Japanese designed and piloted a new course blending a traditional introduction to data science with immersive project-based applications across four disciplines. Students with no prior data science experience spent their mornings learning how to use the statistical software package R to wrangle and extract meaning from data, and their afternoons critically applying these skills to research projects on topics ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch art to tick-borne disease to Japanese pop culture to abortion policy.
Phil Murphy writes about a META Lab team that worked with the Salinas, California city hall on a project called “Evaluation of strengthening relations between law enforcement and the community” that was solicited by City Hall in Salinas, CA in the wake of three police shootings in a one month span. The META Lab was asked to measure the efficacy of the program. The project was initiated in July, 2016 and concluded in July of 2018.