UVA's First-Ever Data Science Majors Begin Their Journey

A new era at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science officially kicked off, as the inaugural class of data science undergraduate majors arrived for orientation on the eve of UVA’s first day of classes. 

Throughout the day at the new School of Data Science building, students heard from faculty and staff, learned more about their curriculum, took headshots and a group photograph, and began to familiarize themselves with classrooms and other features of the facility that would be their academic home. 

The day also served as a call to action, as students learned not only what requirements would be needed to complete their degree but what a data science education at UVA represented — and the integral role they would soon play in advancing the mission of the first school in the nation dedicated to the field.

“We don’t want to be the first at being it. We want to be the first at it and be the best,” Phil Bourne, founding dean of the School of Data Science, told the students. “But that’s only going to happen when you perform here and when you perform in your careers going forward.

Bourne also urged students, as they learned new technical skills in the years ahead, to not lose sight of a foundational principle of the School of Data Science.

“I want you to think about how you use those skills to really promote data science for the public good and society’s benefit,” he said. 

Brian Wright, director of undergraduate programs at the School of Data Science, highlighted the diversity of the 75-student cohort, with 57% of the class identifying as female — a figure that was significantly higher than is typically seen in STEM programs at UVA, he said.

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“We’re setting a new standard,” Wright said.  

The day also offered students the opportunity to get to know one another and, potentially, plant the seeds for future collaborations — another core value of the School.

Claire Bassett said she hadn’t decided on an academic path when she arrived at UVA from Baltimore as a first-year student in fall 2023. But after a conversation with Wright, she knew that the School of Data Science could be a home for her.

“I could tell how supportive and welcoming the community was going to be, and that’s really, I think, what drove me into data science,” she said. 

Bassett said that one of the aspects of her new academic program that she is most excited about is that she is joining a group of students who are all embarking on a new path.

“I think that’s really going to bond us together,” she said.

The launch of the data science undergraduate program, which was approved by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia last September, comes 10 years after the creation of a data science master’s degree at UVA, which was then offered by the Data Science Institute, the precursor to the School of Data Science. 

An online data science master’s program was launched in 2019 and was followed by a data science undergraduate minor in 2020 and then a doctoral program in 2022. With the establishment of the major, the School of Data Science now has a full offering of degree options for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

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Students apply to the data science major in the spring of their first year, provided they have completed or are in the process of completing the program’s two prerequisite courses, DS 1001: Foundations of Data Science and DS 1002: Programming for Data Science. 

The new major is a three-year program, and its curriculum focuses on the four domains that guide work at the School of Data Science: analytics, systems, value, and design, which are applied toward a fifth domain, practice.

While there will be many more classes of data science majors in the years ahead, the Class of 2027 will be the only one who can lay claim to being the first. It is a leap of faith that did not go unnoticed by Wright and Bourne.

Wright told the group it took “courage” to be the first class to pursue this new program and encouraged students to share feedback with faculty and staff throughout their time at the School.

“Come to us and push us and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t working. This is working. This is what we want from this degree,’” he said. 

Wright added: “The whole process here, everything that we do, we want to do it for you guys.”

Taking risks and charting new paths are central ideas in the story of efforts to establish data science as an academic discipline at UVA, and Bourne saluted the School's newest group of risk-takers for joining that tradition.

“Thank you for taking the journey with us,” he said.