Thinking about graduate school in data science, statistics, math, or computer science? Come and learn from alumni who have been there! You’ll learn all about applying to graduate school and how to be a strong applicant, how to decide if grad school is right for you, what to do now to prepare, and different career paths after grad school. Please fill out the survey here to prepare questions for the panelists.
* This event is co-sponsored by SuccessWorks, Data Science Club, and Statistics Club.
[Volunteering in Tech]
A partner of YWCA (homeless shelter focused on battling racism and empowering women), who is also an UW alumnus, recently started a tech program that allows their residents to learn technical skills in order to help them fetch more sustainable jobs that can positively alter their financial situations.
He is looking for volunteers from the DS Club to help aid the tech program: IT-Fridays revolves around learning basic computer skills, Google Drive and Excel. The program will be held on Friday evenings from 6-7pm. This would be a great opportunity for those of you looking for ample leadership experience to build your resumes. Please reach out to Shreya Mittal (mittalshreya902@gmail.com) if you are interested in this opportunity.
[Interview Skills Workshop]
As scheduled, we will have the workshop on interviewing strategies this week, but the event will be on Tuesday instead of our regular meeting time. The workshop will be co-hosted by Undergraduate Statistics Club (excited!), and tech specialist Amy Yang from SuccessWorks will join us to discuss how to stand out in your next job interview. She will also be going through a new interviewing resource SuccessWorks is offering for L&S students.
Interested in doing analytics projects? Looking for opportunities to work with real world data? Want to help local governments think creatively about issues happening in cities? If the answer is yes, this event is right for you. The UniverCity Year program at UW Madison will come in this Thursday to introduce their program and the potential analytics opportunities. Projects can address a wide range of concerns around sustainability, economic development, education, health, housing and more.
Git is widely used as an open source distributed version control system for groups and individual programmers collaborating and tracking changes in source code during software development. The ability to use version control is a valuable skill for every programmer to possess. Professor Tyler Caraza-Harter will be joining us this week to lead the workshop on git.
Please install git via the link here in advance and bring your laptops to the meeting.
This week’s meeting will be Dr. Shivaram Venkataraman discussing big data systems in general and his research. His research interests are in designing systems and algorithms for large scale data analysis and machine learning.
For this week’s meeting, we are fortunate enough to have Dr. Sebastian Raschka, the No.1 most influential data scientist on GitHub, come in to discuss his research and some ML/DL techniques. Specifically, he will give an introduction to ordinal regression and a brief tutorial on PyTorch.
Soft-biometric characteristics include a person’s age, gender, race, and health status. As many Deep Learning-centric applications are developed in recent years, the automatic extraction of soft biometric attributes can happen without the user’s agreement, thereby raising several privacy concerns. This talk will introduce how to extract soft-biometric attributes from facial images, as well as how to conceal soft-biometric information for enhancing privacy.
Welcome back to campus! If you haven’t done so, officially join the Data Science Club on the Wisconsin Involvement Network. As the school year begins, we are excited to resume hosting workshops, student panels, and seminars to support professional development in data science of our members.
Here are the presentation slides from our kickoff meeting. Feel free to contact us at dotdatauw@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more about the research openings and internship opportunities.
CoM: The City of Madison will soon be posting their summer internship openings in the coming weeks. Laura Larsen (LLarsen@cityofmadison.com) will let us know when this happens and I will pass along all links and information.
USGS: The United States Geological Survey has (understandably) reached capacity for their summer interns, but is interested in interns during the semester:”While the USGS Water Data Science team does not currently have internship openings for this summer, we are always seeking motivated individuals. In the past, we have also had interns work part-time throughout the academic year and offered flexible schedules to fit with their class load. It is never to early to start a dialogue about working with us in the future. Please reach out to Lindsay Platt (Data Scientist, lplatt@usgs.gov) or Jordan Read (Chief of Data Science, jread@usgs.gov) to discuss your interest and potential opportunities for the future. If you have more of an interest in pure software engineering, Carl Schroedl (Computer Scientist, cschroedl@usgs.gov) would love to hear from you!”USGS: The USGS has (understandably) reached capacity for their summer interns, but is interested in interns during the semester:”While the USGS Water Data Science team does not currently have internship openings for this summer, we are always seeking motivated individuals. In the past, we have also had interns work part-time throughout the academic year and offered flexible schedules to fit with their class load. It is never to early to start a dialogue about working with us in the future. Please reach out to Lindsay Platt (Data Scientist, lplatt@usgs.gov) or Jordan Read (Chief of Data Science, jread@usgs.gov) to discuss your interest and potential opportunities for the future. If you have more of an interest in pure software engineering, Carl Schroedl (Computer Scientist, cschroedl@usgs.gov) would love to hear from you!”
For last week’s meeting we were fortunate enough to have Professor Rekatsinas (rekatsinas@wisc.edu) come in to discuss his perspective on Data Science. I’d very much encourage you to check out his slides and potentially reach out to him about research opportunities (provided you have programming experience). As we discussed at our research meeting, don’t be afraid to follow up if you don’t hear back in a week!
THIS WEEK:
Shell scripting and being able to use the command line is a critical skill for anyone doing analyses. Many CS students don’t learn how to navigate a terminal until they’re forced to, so it’s definitely a skill worth having. We’ll be joined this week by Professor Tyler Caraza-Harter, who will be leading a workshop on this integral skill.
[DataSci] BASH: The Command Line
Scheduled: Mar 28, 2019 at 6:30 PM
Location: Room 1441, Genetics-Biotech
LAST MEETING:
Right before spring break we met to go over the Do’s and Don’ts of building your résumé. Tech Specialist Amy Yang gave a presentation and discussed keeping a master résumé and customizing it for each company you apply to. She also discussed whether or not you need a cover letter and some caveats for styling your résumé, as well as opportunities for free professional attire. Please see the attach presentation (I promise it’s useful).