I’m Connor MacKinnon and I was originally in Professor Frazier’s Data 100 class and have switched over to this class now. I’m happy to still be in a very interesting COLL course and I think I got very lucky for that reason. I’m from Massachussetts and came to William and Mary to get a liberal arts degree and major in computer science. I’ve been exploring data science too as a possibility but I’m still learning what that all entails! Academically I would love to improve both my writing and my data/reading skills in this class. I would also like to pick up more programming and try and work with R more in the future. I appreciate some of the almost philosophical aspects of this class too and when considering development or scale there are so many intertwined parts.
I think data science can hugely impact and improve quality of life for humanity, the environment and just about everything else. I hold this belief because data science to me represents using the extremely efficient power of computers to find trends and relationships where humans would never be able to identify them (at least in a timely fashion). By being able to identify these global trends or frequencies in any given system, we are given the ability to tweak the variables in those systems to try and reach desired effects. Most complex systems have far too much happening to intuitively do this to begin with, therefore data science is the step in between that allows people to know what they can change to get the desired outcome of a system. It seems to be the science of the future, in all aspects of that phrase.
I also believe that data science can be a very valuable warning for the future. This is because by identifying trends and extrapolating, you can uncover potential issues down the road and have foresight to proactively manage problems. Right now (without immediate facts) I believe that climate change is continuing to be an ongoing threat and I would surmise that data science could easily identify the way we are trending and how soon we may encounter very serious change we are no longer able to combat. Essentially, the power to analyze is the power to predict. Understanding the consequences of actions we take today will better prepare us for problems of the future.
Additionally, I believe data science is highly marketable too and as far as business and economics go, data analysts will be (if they are not already) demanded for at about every major corporation. This is because one, I’ve heard that there is a shortage of data scientist and many are getting very high paying jobs due to the supply and demand in that skillset, and two, because businesses are made up of trends and are all about trying to figure out the future and consumer’s tendencies. Obviously there’s no way to see the future, but to reliably predict it even a percentage of the time would be substantial to a businesses sales. I have no doubt FAANG and more companies all heavily utilize data science to improve their business by magnitudes.
I look forward to the future with data science and the innovation and level of saftey it may provide. One crucial aspect I’d identify as a problem early on is the a political scale of countries actually being able to agree to pass legislation and make changes to fix issues like climate change that we scientifically know to be a growing problem. Due to the sheer power of computers now and our ability to process data with them we can finally look at global sized data sets and make reasonable assumptions. I simply project it to be a matter of concern as to getting people to listen to data scientists and acknowledging what they’ve found.