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Msc Big Data Science at Queen Mary University

Dear all,

I am hoping to hear from someone who has completed this course/a similar postgraduate course in the UK. I am a maths graduate and I am keen to start a career in data science and would therefore like to complete a postgraduate course in this subject.

I was just wondering how much prior computer science/programming knowledge is required for this course? The entry requirements on the website cover a variety of subjects so I am hoping I will be okay with a maths background. I just don't want to end up in a high level programming course that I will not be able to access due to limited prior knowledge.

I have been self studying some programming aspects online (python, MATLAB ect. ) but I am definitely still a beginner.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Original post by curioustudent33
Dear all,

I am hoping to hear from someone who has completed this course/a similar postgraduate course in the UK. I am a maths graduate and I am keen to start a career in data science and would therefore like to complete a postgraduate course in this subject.

I was just wondering how much prior computer science/programming knowledge is required for this course? The entry requirements on the website cover a variety of subjects so I am hoping I will be okay with a maths background. I just don't want to end up in a high level programming course that I will not be able to access due to limited prior knowledge.

I have been self studying some programming aspects online (python, MATLAB ect. ) but I am definitely still a beginner.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks


So I did a dissertation for my 1st masters in Machine Learning, so I can offer a little bit of insight:

Generally it is much much easier for a person with a maths/stats background to go in to Data Science compared to a someone with a CS background going in to Data Science.

"Big Data" or "Data Science" aren't really all that new. Tesco was working with big data sets from the early 90's. Whenever I hear the term Big Data or Data Science, it really means Computational Statistics. It has been around for a long time. What is different now is the amount of data we are producing, so we have to adapt older algorithms and develop new algorithms to accommodate this.

The likes of Google have done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the CS elements of data science e.g. they have produced Tensorflow. Same goes for Python libraries and R libraries. They have already been written for data science, you just need to reference them and tweak them for your own ends.

The amount of programming Data Scientists do isn't all that much. Mainly you will be writing a few scripts, perhaps 100 lines or less usually. You can easily learn the programming skills you need within a semester.
Hi Jesternow,

Thank you for your reply. That is very encouraging to hear given that I am confident with statistics.

Thanks : )

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