M10: Introducing Undergraduates to Data Science Research through Research Training Seminar Series

Information

The research training seminar series in the mathematics department at the University of St. Francis, a small liberal arts university, provides undergraduate students with some of the skills needed to engage in mathematical research. The audience at a seminar is typically 5-10 junior/senior mathematics majors. For last year’s series, we ran two seminars with the goal of introducing students to skills needed to begin a research project in data science. The sessions covered an introduction to Python, data exploration, wrangling, and modeling. Students were provided with a data set and a Jupyter notebook, including some pre-written code. As new concepts were introduced, participants ran sample code and then had the opportunity to conduct their own explorations and share their findings. In this presentation, we will discuss these seminars, share the session materials, and give suggestions for those wanting to run a similar program at their own institutions. We will conclude by presenting some student pre- and post-survey responses on their perceptions of mathematical research, particularly with aspects of data science research, after having attended some of the series events.