Features

Degree: Bachelor鈥檚 in data science
Data science area of concentration: Biology
Hometown: Syosset, New York
Tyler Trine 鈥16Degree: Bachelor鈥檚 in data science
Data science area of concentration: Brain and cognitive sciences
Hometown: Wolcott, New York
This summer, two of the data science program鈥檚 first new graduates will be headed to Manhattan, to begin working at data discovery and sharing company 1010data.
Anthony Margetic 鈥16 and Tyler Trine 鈥16 got their feet wet at the company last summer, when they were interns there.
鈥淚t was exciting to be there for just two and a half months,鈥 says Trine. 鈥淚 want to go along for the ride.鈥
They鈥檙e already off to a roaring start, having devoted themselves to the program the year before it was even launched, structuring their schedules to get prerequisites out of the way before the program began. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been a jam-packed two years,鈥 says Trine.
But those two years have given them a new way of seeing the world. 鈥淒ata science is a way of thinking,鈥 says Margetic. 鈥淵ou want to get to the questions that no one else is looking for.鈥
It鈥檚 the fluidity and interdisciplinarity of data science that first drew him. 鈥淚 love learning about all kinds of stuff. I didn鈥檛 want to be stuck in one field,鈥 he says.
For Trine, discovering the field of data science was finding an intellectual home for the kind of thinking he was already doing. He had started reading philosophy and picked up a book on semiotics, the study of how we make meaning. The linguistics minor was intrigued by 鈥渨hat it means to be informed,鈥 he says. 鈥淚t became a preoccupation. I wanted to understand how people do it on a deep level, how we take in rich sources of information intuitively.鈥
Says Trine, 鈥淚t used to be that data was scarce, and the main enterprise was squeezing the most out of it. Now we鈥檙e data-rich, but still information-poor.鈥 Data scientists like Margetic and Trine hope to change that.
Margetic says that having the phrase 鈥渄ata science鈥 attached to a degree helps set him apart because it highlights a breadth of skills. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e a math person or an engineer, you have a subset of the skills I have as a data scientist.鈥