[NABS-L] Question About Studying Data Science in College

[Manahil Jafri]

Hi Dana, 

I want to start off by saying welcome! We are so excited to have you be a part of our NABS community and hope you will stick around! 

I love the question you proposed about studying Data Science as I had similar concerns when starting my own degree. This concept of “eyeballing” is one that I’ve struggled to completely figure out, so I am curious to hear the other responses on the list. I do find myself, assuming that the data set your working with is cleaned, to just immediately start running my regression models or other analysis techniques to figure out what the data is saying, rather than trying to eyeball and have a general idea. The issue that may come up is that without overviewing your data, you can’t use your general intuition to determine whether your model is seemingly correct, however, I usually find myself working backwards and running my model, and then if I don’t feel like it’s right, I go tiresly through the data sheet to scope for possible outliers or anything that could possibly skew my results. If your working with a uncleaned dataset, that will pose more issues, but I found that after I methodically work to clean it, I can just run my model and use my prior knowledge on the topic to guide my intuition. 

I have also found with more qualitative results, I just incessantly press the down arrow on my excel sheet to try to gain a general idea of survey responses, though this may not be completely viable for comprehension for larger data sets, it does give you a general idea of what your results should be before you run your models. 

Though I’m not directly majoring in data science, my major requires a lot of data science corses so if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out! I hope this was some what helpful haha. 

All the best,
Manahil 
-
Manahil Jafri
She/hers/her 
Membership Committee Co-Chair | National Association of Blind Students 
Secretary and Treasurer | New York Association of Blind Students  


On Aug 26, 2022, at 2:00 PM, dana mohsen via NABS-L <nabs-l at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone,
> I am a new member of this list.
> My name is Dana Mohsen, and I'm a non-U.S. citizen who is visually impaired.
> I am going into my senior year of high school, and I'm interested in
> pursuing a Batchelers degree in data science  in the U.S.
> I'd like to know, what are some of the challenges students face pursuing
> this degree?
> What are some ways you view large quantities of data?
> How do you "skim" through data to quicken the process of understanding a
> data set?
> I guess sighted people call it "eye-balling"
> Thank you so much in advance.
> Sincerely
> Dana Mohsen
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