Minor in Data Science

Data science now impacts every industry, every job, and virtually every decision. Notre Dame's data science minor helps you explore this exciting field and learn to approach the challenging problems of our time with innovative analytical tools.

Emphasizing computational science, communication skills, and ethics, the five-course sequence includes classes in data science and programming, as well as three electives that can be customized to your course of study. These electives delve into the applications of data science, demonstrate ways to communicate findings, and offer insights into privacy and ethics.

For students interested in the analytic and modeling elements of data science, the data science minor offers a specialized analytics track as well. 

The data science minor is open to all Notre Dame students. The minor is housed in the College of Arts and Letters' Technology & Digital Studies Hub with support from the Department of Sociology and the College of Engineering.

View the Minor Requirements

You will learn how to

• Understand data in its different forms
• Collect data 
• Obtain data through scraping (using a program to download and process data from webpages) or mining (extracting and analyzing usable data from a large dataset)
• Parse and transform data into structures designed for analysis
• Draw meaning from data 
• Visualize data to improve understanding
• Statistically analyze data to summarize, draw inferences, and make predictions
• Discover and characterize patterns in large data sets
• Collect, analyze, and present data in an ethically responsible manner and understand privacy issues
• Communicate effectively about data, methods, and conclusions