Data science is changing the world and this minor — open to all UH students — helps our students engage in that transformation. We begin with the fact that the tools that have driven the new approaches to data all started in practical applications. The data science revolution isn't led by an elite group of believers but by a groundswell of pragmatic approaches emerging together to create a new way of looking at the world. The minor allows students to combine courses from majors around campus, and our expanding list of partnerships provide research and community engagement opportunities that tie the whole picture together. 

Society is not a single thing — it's all the ways we communicate with each other and all the ways we convince each other to work together on shared projects. Understanding how data can be used to make an argument, how a representation is convincing or not, how a decision is well-grounded or not, all go back to the pragmatic elements of collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and representing data. The partnership with the Community Health Workers Initiative and its network of researchers and frontline health workers makes the pragmatic data problems in public health available to our students for projects in class and beyond. Other partnerships include educational and ecological data projects, and each student is encouraged to find a place where they are inspired to engage with the problems themselves.