This past summer, Varsha Vaidyanath worked on the Data Science Discovery Program’s Census Project Jupyter Notebooks team, which worked to create lesson plans for high school students to help them learn about data science using the US Census data.

"If you are curious about anything, then data science will certainly fuel that curiosity further."

Question: What interests you about data science?
Answer: I believe data science is in a digital renaissance. It can bring together people from all disciplines. I cannot think of a better confluence between Liberal Arts and STEM, or a better place to learn about it than UC Berkeley. While huge volumes of data existed for decades, what has inevitably changed is how every aspect of our lives is generating more data than ever before, which is also getting recorded, processed, and analyzed. Learning to ask or frame good questions, being aware of how data affects every part of our lives, and why many domains of expertise are required in our data science communities is important.

Q: Any advice for those interested in data science?
A: If you are curious about anything, then data science will certainly fuel that curiosity further. Explore a class in a domain that connects with your interests, and find problems that you want to solve. Learn the tools and methods of Data Science that will help analyze and arrive at your own findings, which may even surprise you. For inspiration, simply look around; you might find it’s closer than you think. “