By James Laird | Reporter
The Data Science Club at Baylor prepares students for a career in data science and related fields while also helping build a community among its members. The club organizes info sessions with companies, game nights, professional development workshops and real world projects.
The club began with two founding members, Redmond, Wash., senior Kayla Balkcum and Galveston senior Luke Roe, and now has around 30 members. Balkcum and Roe are now co-presidents of the club. The goal of the club is to create a community for not only data science majors, but any students who may be interested.
“We founded [this] my sophomore year, so before that there wasn’t really any opportunity for data science students to connect with students of other years,” Balkcum said. “So I think it gives students a good opportunity to just hear about what is coming for them in their data science career from older students and also to learn about the wide range of opportunities that they’ll be able to have once they graduate.”
Roe said when founding the club, they had to decide between a more technical focus to the club or a community focused approach. He and Balkcum decided on building a community.
“[Other data science clubs], it’s very technically driven, technically focused, but we figured there’s a bunch of other clubs that do that, so let’s be something different,” Roe said. “Let’s try and be a place where you can meet other data science majors, make friends and work on homework together.”
The Data Science Club still puts a lot of focus on professional development, network and projects. However, one of the big projects the club has is working together with the Baylor baseball team, according to Roe and Balkcum.
“So right now, we’re just working on basic machine learning, how we can apply that to help them get insights, like line up optimization and anything that we could do with machine learning or linear regression,” Balkcum said.
The club also hosts info sessions with the Career Center, companies and industry professionals. Most recently they hosted an info session with Accenture, accompanied by a game night. Roe said there are great opportunities for students of all classes.
“Having Accenture come in and do an info session is really great for the seniors and juniors who are looking for jobs, but you also need the game night for sophomores and freshmen who are just there to meet people and just see what’s up and have a good time,” Roe said.
The Data Science Club at Baylor aims to build a community for all students, not just data scientists, Roe said. As for the future of the club, both Balkcum and Roe said they hope to see continued growth and Balkcum is trying to set up a data science competition. Both co-founders said they are proud of what the club has grown into.
“This is really what we wanted [the club] to be, we had the sort of fork in the road,” Roe said. “We could either go technical and do hackathons and coding stuff, or we could be more of a community. And I think what it’s turned out to be has really been our vision.”
