Real Data and Real Solutions in MATH 527
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On a cloudy afternoon this past December, a group of McGill students gathered in a downtown Montréal boardroom to give a data science presentation to Citera, a sustainability analytics company. This presentation wasn’t for an internship or any other extracurricular activity – it was part of one of McGill’s newest and most innovative courses: MATH 527, Statistical Data Science Practicum.
It’s a six-credit, two-semester course taught by Dr. José Correa and Professor Eric Kolaczyk of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. In its first iteration for the 2023-2024 academic year, MATH 527 employs a flipped classroom model, with class sessions focusing primarily on group discussions and projects rather than lectures. Its central organizing principle is the data science life cycle, encountered first in the Fall semester from a statistics-centric perspective, before shifting in the Winter semester to the perspective of a statistician working in the larger data science environment.