“I feel I have a better understanding of how to communicate my work to different groups of people. We met with stakeholders, other Data+ teams, and people from the University, all with different levels of technical knowledge, and this really allowed me to be adaptable in how I present what I've worked on. Before, I really thought "data scientist" described what I wanted to be. Now, I have a better understanding of the things I like and dislike. Working extensively on modeling this summer has made me aware that I really enjoy project management on real world projects, which is great insight to have so early in my undergraduate career.”
—Meredith Brown
Getting Granular on Social Determinants of Health

“I have gained experience in applying my classroom knowledge of data science to real world problems. I have made connections that could help further my future data science careers. I have also received offers and opportunities to continue working on the Data+ project and other related projects in the next coming semesters. At first, I thought data science and statistics were basically the same thing. I now realize how insanely wrong I was. Data science is this incredible combination of statistics, computer science, communications, and any other hobby or interest you so choose. I never would have realized the infinite ways data science could be applied, and I am so thankful that this program has changed my perception of Data Science research.”
—Maria Henriquez
Optimizing Risk Assessment for Duke University Student Athlete Injury Prevention

“I’ve gained technical/coding skills, tangible experience with real big data, communication and public speaking skills, patience, and flexibility. There is way more problem-solving, dirty data, and things you have to account for than I thought in data science. Also, nothing is straightforward. Anything "shown" through data has used specific algorithms to get there.”
—Brooke Scheinberg
Recidivism in Durham County Jails

“Data+ enabled me to hone my research, communication, and presentation skills. I never fully understood the data science discipline until this experience.”
—Victoria Worsham
Investigating Oil and Gas Production in the United Kingdom

“As a second time participant in Data+, I gained experience in a different type of data science project. Last summer, my team started with dirty data which we cleaned and performed NLP/machine learning classification on. This summer, my team had to web scrape and make API requests to collect a significant portion of data. Collecting and cleaning data enabled me to think more about how to obtain and organize data in a way that is convenient for the next person using it. Building a dashboard to visualize trends in the data introduced me to iterative dashboard design, in which a series of client-specific changes are made after the general structure and functionality of the dashboard is built. For example, changing the user input bar from a sidebar to a horizontal bar displayed input options more clearly and made more user-friendly for our client."
—Cathy Lee
Breaking the Bundle

“The exposure to lots of different methods and applications across data science has been very eye-opening. I've also gained perspective on the kind of skills, both "soft" and "hard,” that are useful both in academic environments and the real world. I didn't realize how much of data science was learning and researching topics on the fly. This is encouraging, because it means that if you can develop this skill of being able to quickly learn a topic/language/method, you're rarely under-qualified for a job or position.”
—Alex Bendeck
Basketball Analytics Pipeline

“I gained a passion for sports analytics and learned important ML concepts. You really can apply data science to any field you like.”
—Anshul Shah
Basketball Analytics Pipeline

“I feel like I gained a lot of hard skills related to coding in different languages like Python and R. I'm really happy I had a chance to dive into some more complex machine learning problems like computer vision. Most importantly, I feel like I've gained enough confidence in my data science skills to pursue a related career after college.
—Niyaz Nurbhasha
Basketball Analytics Pipeline

“The most important thing I've gained this summer is a sense of understanding of what it's like to work for a client and produce deliverables on a timeline. The biggest takeaway I've gotten about data science is how much data is missing in the world, and how hard it can be to find. There are a lot of really beautiful, well formatted datasets out there, but sometimes, there just isn't a way to get what you're looking for--and that's often where you come in. There's a lot of time spent putting together these datasets in a meaningful way, and figuring out how to format them in the most helpful way for future work, especially if you're not going to be the ones using them. It's a lot like commenting code, but tagging your columns is really important to ensure that everyone going forward knows how to work with what you've put together.”
—Cassandra Turk
Identifying Extreme Events in Wholesale Energy Markets

“I now understand there are many ways to be useful in a collaborative environment. As the only non-technical major on my team, I first believed I couldn't bring as much to the table, but I found there is immense utility in being the person with the least technical experience. Not only was I able to perceive problems in a different way, offering fresh solutions, but I was also able to gain much more knowledge from my teammates. Additionally, I was able to incorporate my sociological understanding of people into the design aspect of our project to create a truly useful user experience. No matter your background, technical or non-technical, you always have something important to share and to learn.”
—Elizabeth Loschiavo
Big Data for Reproductive Health (Year 2)

“I think that Data+ has taught me a lot about how to create something really cool out of nothing. We had to change our project goals because of technical issues and holdups, and I think I learned a lot about how to go from just raw data and ask really interesting questions.”
—Aidan Fitzsimons
Recidivism in Durham County Jails
 

“I gained valuable experience with working both with data, something I had never had the chance to do before, but perhaps more importantly I gained insight into working with a small team alongside a project manager.”
—Dennis Harssch​​​​​​​
Big Data for Reproductive Health (Year 2)

“I didn't know Data Science research was a thing at the undergraduate level, so it showed me some possibilities. I have gained a better understanding of machine learning topics and when to apply different methods. I've also learned a lot looking at results from our models and pulling meaning out of them–even if that meaning is just that there was a bug and we need to redo it differently.”
—Varun Nair
Deep Learning and Energy Access Decisions

“Data+ in many ways widened my perception of what it means to participate in Data Science research. My particular project was pretty in line with my perception before coming to Data+ but many of the other projects looked very different than I imagined a Data Science research project looking in terms of the type of data they were using and the clients.”
—Ryan Culhane
Speech Emotion Analysis

“I feel I have gained a much greater understanding of how to approach problems computationally as well as working on a small team in order to solve/fix these problems! It has been a great experience overall, and I wish I could do it again. Working with the stakeholders we had was great, because they were also so involved and enthusiastic. Our project manager couldn't have been better either. I had a great summer with Data+! It was honestly more exciting and fun than I realized, and participating in Data+ helped me see that I could do computational work in the future and be happy doing it.”
—Jake Sumner
Athletic Injury Risk Assessment

“This summer of Data+ showed me that data science research is also interested in intensely analyzing and understanding outliers of a dataset, rather than just the averages. Many probability and statistics classes emphasize the mean, variation, and overall distribution of a dataset without paying too much attention to the outliers and asking if those outliers can really be explained by the same set of processes affecting 99%+ of the other data points. This summer of Data+ showed me that data science research is also interested in intensely analyzing and understanding these outliers.”
—Alec Ashforth
Identifying Extreme Events in Wholesale Energy Markets

“Having no prior exposure, outside of a statistics course, to data science and data visualization, I feel like I got a lot out of this program. At least for me, there was a little bit of "drinking from a firehose,” and a steep learning curve but I learned a lot very quickly. The data visualization programs with which I worked are definitely ones I could see myself using in the future.”
—Anonymous student
Remembering the Middle Passage

“I have gained extensive knowledge about all the human rights conflicts in the world and also just a general understanding of many different facts of data science. I realized that I am not as interested in research as a profession, but I did learn that the digital humanities are a very legitimate field.”
—Anonymous student

“I have gained some knowledge in R as well as great teamwork skills.”
—Marco Gonzalez Blancas
Duke Building Energy Use Report

“I feel I have gained a lot of technical skills regarding natural language processing which I really wanted to experience. I also got to experience what it was like working on a research team and attempting to solve a problem in that setting, which I found really valuable. I realized that data science really is a part of every field and it is so broad in terms of scope and what kind of work you will be doing.”
—Nikhil Kaul
Invisible Adaptations

“I went from fumbling through CS101 my freshman fall to playing around with the hyper parameters of machine learning algorithms! That's a success in my book. I learned that data science projects take time and many little failures before you can arrive at anything close to the outcome that you'd like. I learned that, seemingly counterintuitively, I can't rely on other people to teach me things I can learn on my own, but there exists a whole community of people in data science who want to help me learn and grow. I feel more confident tackling problems that have no clear solution, and I've found a new appreciation for API documentations. I'm so thankful that I had the opportunity to spend my summer with Data+!”
—Micalyn Struble
Neuroscience in the Courtroom

“I can code significantly faster now. I have also been through a truncate version of the problem solving process in the real world.”
—Ellis Ackerman 
Durham Evictions

“I have gotten a better look at where humanities can be useful and frankly, necessary, in implementing new methodologies and approaches to the data science field.”
—Anonymous

“I have learned a lot about JavaScript and Google Earth Engine and issuing remote sensing data to see what changes are happening at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and how they are happening. I have also learned that working on a project like this is a great way to learn and make something at the same time.”
—Katelyn Chang
Saltwater Intrusion on Coastal Ecosystems

“I’ve learned many technical tools for data analysis as well as improved my abilities as working part of a team. It was a unique experience working in data science research because this type of work isn’t offered in the lab portion of many classes. It’s an incredible opportunity to engage in data science research as an undergraduate student, especially when the decision making process is mostly up to you and your team.”
—Jeevan Tewari
Human Rights in the Postwar World

“Data+ helped me learn a lot about how to create a machine learning pipeline in order to discover meaningful relationships in data. It also gave me a broader view of data science and career opportunities. I also learned that data science research involves a lot of preprocessing and simply turning the data into a form that a model can digest.”
—Michael Xue
Speech Emotion Analysis

“I've learned so much about data science and I now feel very comfortable coding in several languages. There were multiple times during the summer where I was asked to do something and had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but Data+ gave me the skills and confidence to solve problems beyond what I thought was the limit of my knowledge. (Ultimately, I became really good at googling how to code!). I learned the importance of communication. It's very easy to spend all day coding, but if you're not able to communicate with the public on what you are doing, the code is meaningless.”
—Anonymous

“I have gained a more realistic understanding of what working in a data scientist role looks like. I have learned a lot more than I was expecting to and cemented the skills that I had learned in class. I came into the summer unsure of what area of technology I wanted to pursue as a career, but now I am more confident of my role within data science. I have further learned what it looks like to work within a team, with a manager, and with other coworkers.”
—Jackson Hubbard
Basketball Analytics Pipeline