The Data Science course at Smith College—first offered in 2013—is an elective in the new program in Statistical & Data
Sciences and in the Applied Statistics minor. The course provides a practical foundation for students to compute with data,
by participating in the entire data analysis cycle (from forming a statistical question, data acquisition, cleaning, transforming, modeling and interpretation). The course introduces students to tools for data management, storage, and manipulation that are common in data science, and students apply those tools to real scenarios. Students undertake practical analyses using real, large, messy datasets using modern computing tools (e.g., R, SQL) and learn to think statistically in approaching all of the aspects of data analysis (see Baumer 2015 for a complete discussion of the course).