Episode 9: WiDS special: A reflection from students perspectives
Hello and welcome to this special episode of the DSMINDSETS Podcast! In this episode Chang Sun is the host and our student assistant Anna-Lena Arlt is co-hosting.
We will talk about this year’s Women in Data Science (WiDS) Maastricht Datathon, of which Chang was one of the organizers. Anna-Lena participated in this event, together with two friends and fellow students Sophia Longwe and Marisol Martin.
The three are in the second year of the Bachelor ‘Global Studies’ at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences here at UM.
The three first talk about their motivations to join the Datathon. The idea of working towards climate change mitigation using Data Science and Machine Learning caught their attention. Furthermore, Anna-Lena got really interested in the field of Data Science and therefore she saw the Data Challenge as a great opportunity to improve her skills and learn more about what it means to be a Data Scientist. Marisol also said that she is interested in policy making and thelink between data solutions for (social) problems.
During the WiDS event
The Global Studies program is very interdisciplinary and the three students are basically trained as “global problem solvers” as Sophia explained. The students started the data challenge looking at the problem first and trying to understand the given variables and how they might impact the solution.
During their studies they already worked with Python and they learned some basic steps of the Data Science pipeline. Still, as this is not a main part of the program and they have not worked much with actual projects yet, the students considered themselves as beginner/intermediately skilled participants. They really enjoyed this learning experience and reported that their teamwork was amazing as they helped each other out and could discuss ideas for solutions together. Also, at the end of the event, when the top 5 teams presented their solutions, the students looked at how more experienced participants solved the problem. They tried to understand as much as possible and considered the help they got during the event as really helpful, for example the pre-training sessions or the support of the senior level data scientists from IDS.
Chang also tells the story of how she came to be a WiDS ambassador.
Take-aways
In the reflections at the end of the episode everyone agrees on the importance of considering multiple perspectives and really understanding a problem first, before developing solutions. Finally, the students reflect on the role of data science in their previous education and how they want to use their data science skills in the future.
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