By James Laird | Journalist
The Data Science Club of Baylor Prepare students for a career in data science and related areas while also helping to build a community among its members. The club organizes information sessions with companies, game evenings, professional development workshops and real projects.
The club started with two founding members, Redmond, Washington, Kayla Balkcum and Luke Roe Senior de Galveston, and now has around thirty members. Balkcum and Roe are now co-presenting of the club. The club’s objective is to create a community not only for data in data science, but also for all students who could be interested.
“We founded (this) my second year, so before that, there was really no possibility for data science students to connect with students over other years,” said Balkcum. “So I think that it gives students a good opportunity to hear what comes to them in their career in older students and also to find out more about the wide range of opportunities they can have their diploma once.”
Roe said that during the club foundation, they had to decide between a more technical objective for the club or a community -oriented approach. He and Balkcum decided to build a community.
“(Other data science clubs), he is very technically motivated, focused on the technical level, but we thought there were a lot of other clubs that do this, so let’s be something different,” said Roe. “Let’s try to be a place where you can meet other data science majors, make friends and work together on homework.”
Data Science Club still emphasizes professional development, network and projects. However, one of the major projects of the club is to work with the Baylor baseball teamAccording to Roe and Balkcum.
“So, at the moment, we are just working on basic automatic learning, how we can apply it to help them get ideas, such as alignment optimization and everything we could do with automatic learning or linear regression,” said Balkcum.
The club also organizes information sessions with the career center, companies and industry professionals. More recently, they organized an information session with EmphasisAccompanied by a match evening. Roe said there were great opportunities for students of all lessons.
“Having accenture between and doing an information session is really great for seniors and juniors looking for jobs, but you also need the game evening for second -year students and first -year students who are just there to meet people and see what’s going on and have a good time,” said Roe.
The Data Science Club of Baylor aims to build a community for all students, not just data scientists, said Roe. As for the future of the club, Balkcum and Roe said they hoped to see continuous growth and Balkcum is trying to set up a data science competition. The two co-founders said they were proud of what the club grew up.
“That’s really what we wanted (the club), we had the kind of fork on the road,” said Roe. “We could either become technical and do hackathons and code things, or we could be more a community. And I think what it turned out is really our vision. ”