ABSTRACT
Unlike most academic fields, data science did not begin as an undergraduate discipline – evolving into more specific and deeper levels of graduate and doctoral study – but rather as a fundamentally master's-level discipline with heavy emphasis on application, driven by the demands of the marketplace for professionals who could translate data into information to solve problems. While the first graduate programs in analytics and data science emerged in 2007, the first formal undergraduate programs in data science did not emerge until 2018. In this chapter, we discuss the nuances of working with an undergraduate population and place particular emphasis on how to get the most out of internships and capstone courses. We highlight programs from the University of Charleston, the University of Georgia, and from the University of New Hampshire. In our “View from the Ground”, we include case studies from the University of New Hampshire and from the Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics at North-West University in South Africa, highlighting the factors that contribute to a successful experience for both student and company. The chapter concludes with our checklist that every analytics manager should consider when engaging undergraduate students in data science.
