The Discovery Track

What is the Discovery Track?

A gentler introduction into data science with a much heavier emphasis on education while still maintaining a formal, intensive case team feel, the Discovery Track is an alternative 12-week semester-long experience to a regular case team for individuals with less technical background. In addition to attending weekly teaching sessions, analysts will be expected to work with real data, present their findings at a midpoint and final presentation, and work closely in a team of 4-5 other analysts just like any other HDAG case alongside the educational aspect of the track. The establishment of Discovery is meant to lower barriers to entry to HDAG and give curious individuals a greater opportunity to learn.

Who should apply to Discovery?

We anticipate admitting applicants with no data science background but some prior background in Python or coding in general (e.g. has taken AP computer science courses in high school, has any exposure to common programming language, or has worked on some small coding/code-adjacent project before). The Discovery Track curriculum is envisioned to emulate a real case team experience with education heavily integrated into the work. If you have any degree of prior experience with data science and statistics, and have more than elementary-level familiarity with computer science and coding, we recommend that you apply to be a regular Analyst.

What topics will you learn?

The Discovery Track attempts to teach a broad range of topics, with the main goal of demystifying complicated data science and machine learning topics. Topics build in complexity, starting with python libraries and data science fundamentals (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, data visualization, web scraping), and moving on to machine learning (linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, natural language processing).