Call for Applicants: Undergraduate Data Science Scholars!

Have you worked with social, behavioral, economic or geographic data?

Are you interested in how to extract useful knowledge from data?

The Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3) is partnering with the UMBC Department of Information Systems to establish the UMBC Undergraduate Data Science Scholars Program (DSS) in Fall 2021. Students admitted to the program will work as teaching fellows and peer mentors. They will also network with UC Berkeley data science students, attend special events, and be mentored by faculty. The DSS program welcomes undergraduate scholars from multiple disciplines, including the social sciences, looking at all aspects of data and its impact on society.

Responsibilities: 

• Scholars will work as TFs and peer mentors for undergraduate students in IS296 Foundations of Data Science. The class meets Tu/Th 1:00-2:15pm. The cohort of DSS scholars will meet as a group with the IS296 instructor. Scholars will be paid $15/hour for specific TF tasks, for 5-10 hours per week in fall 2021.

• Social science DSS scholars will attend at least two CS3 events in fall 2021 and/or participate in CS3 research initiatives. The scholars will also be expected to attend one mentoring meeting with CS3 faculty.

Background and skills:

Applicants should have knowledge in at least one of the following:

• Analysis of social, behavioral, economic or geographic data

• Python or one of the data science tools and/or languages (such as Rapid Miner, Weka, Orange, Knime, ML on  cloud computing, python)

• Jupyter notebooks with python or taken IS 296 in a prior semester.

Interested students should send a resume and a brief one or two sentence statement of interest to socialscience@umbc.eduby 9/8/21. Please put “CS3 Data Science Scholars” in the subject line of the email. 

While CS3 will run the admission and mentoring of the social science cohort of DSS, the Department of Information Systems is also partnering with the Center for Women in Technology to run another cohort.