Hello all, Data Science as many of you know just became a new major officially this year. My kid is 90% leaning towards double majoring in it along with CS, or single majoring should he fudge up the CS 3.30 gauntlet. Anyhow, for those of you contemplating Data Science, what domains are you considering? There are so many that look fascinating. It’s important to plan this now since if you’re smart, you’ll want to potentially plan your social science and/or physical science breadths in conjunction with the domain.
BTW here is the current list of domains offered. These are essentially 3-course combos.
@ProfessorPlum168 – Do you already see information on the specific courses required for each domain? Last I saw, it still said “coming soon.”
@LCali511 They actually didn’t link the individual courses pages to each graphic yet, but if you Google search each one, the classes are there. For example if you google “Berkeley data science domain optimizations” you would get the link that shows the required courses for Optimizations and Efficiencies.
Thank you!
I decided to link all the published domain emphasis categories to their required classes. One from Lower Division and 2 from Upper Division:
Applied Mathematics and Modeling
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/applied-math-and-modeling
Business Analytics
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/business-analytics
Cognition and Artificial Intelligence
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/cognition
Computational Biology Methods
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/computational-biology-methods
Computational Imaging
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/computational-imaging
Computational Linguistics & Natural Language Processing
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/computational-linguistics-NLP
Computational Molecular Biology
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/computational-molecular-biology
Digital Humanities and Data Arts
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/digital-humanities-data-arts
Ecology and the Environment
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/ecology-and-environment
Econometrics
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/econometrics
Environmental Economics
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/environmental-economics
Evolution and Biodiversity
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/evolution-and-biodiversity
Geospatial Information and Technology
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/geospatial-info-and-technology
Human Biology
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/human-biology
Industrial Analytics
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/industrial-analytics
Inequalities in Society
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/inequalities-in-society
Optimization and Efficiency
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/optimization-and-efficiency
Organizations and the Economy
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/organizations-and-the-economy
Physical Science Analytics
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/physical-science-analytics
Population Health and Environment
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/population-health-and-environment
Psychology and Cognition
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/psychology-and-cognition
Quantitative Social Science
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/quantitative-social-science
Robotics
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/robotics
Social Policy and Law
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/social-policy-and-law
Social Welfare, Health, and Poverty
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/social-welfare-health-poverty
Toxicology and Disease
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/toxicology-and-disease
Urban Planning and Sustainable Development & Engineering
https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis/urban-planning-sustainable-dev-and-engineering
^ These are extremely helpful links for anyone who’s interested in data science.
Just a comment though, when the Energy Engineering major was created a few years ago, most of the curriculum involved using other department courses that already emphasized or related to energy engineering, and I see a similar pattern for data science. There is Data Science 8, but once you hit the upper-division courses, it’s mostly taking courses from several other departments.
If anything, I think it is a good indication that it’s not really about the major you choose, but which industry field, or domain that interests you, and that there may be courses from multiple departments that address it.
Yeah this major is of huge interest to me personally as I have been on the Data side of things for pretty much my whole career, some 30+ years of agony 
I will say that just like computer programmers and computer science, about a 1/3 if not more of your knowledge and usefulness is domain knowledge and not about computer or data specific stuff. Another 1/3 is related to performance and efficiency (How to move data faster, store more data with limited resources etc) which I’m not sure is covered that much in Data Science.
The evolution of the Data Science major is so deja vu to me. When I was a freshman in college (DePaul U), Computer Science was also in its first year as a full major. A lot of classes were still part of Mathematics, a couple were in Psychology and in Philosophy and a few other places. But they eventually all got moved over to CS shortly. I can see that happening similarly with Data Science as there are a lot of courses in other areas that should belong in data science.
thanks for this. I personally have no idea what I’m thinking about currently. What is your child thinking?
He likes a lot of them which is important for him to narrow it down soon. The reason to do it sooner rather than later is that depending on the domain emphasis, the lower division course and the HCE course could be coordinated with the breadth requirements so you can kill 2 birds with one stone. The Human Biology domain emphasis is a good one for example - the Lower Division Biology class can be used as a Biological Science breadth while the BioEng 100 HCE class can be used as a Philosophy breadth.
The only ones he doesn’t like is Robotics, the Graphics ones and the Biology ones. Everything else seems like fair game for him. If I were to guess I would think maybe Econometrics or Cognition…still early for now.
Did your son attend the webinar for freshman/transfer students? I enjoyed it a lot, the advisor attended Cal many years ago and is married to a comp. scientist working as a company recruiter. I agreed with many things she pointed out about comp. sci. and she also had some great points about capped majors, double-majoring (or minoring) and building your own major according to your interests. It was definitely worth watching, and I think it will be available for other students at some point.
I see some similarities between most interdisciplinary majors such as Cog. Sci. or Data Science. My emphasis will be in computer science. I’m probably not going to take many interesting courses reserved for people who have declared the major (such as software engineering), but I’ll definitely take COMPSCI 170. Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems and COMPSCI 188. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, which I need for graduation.