Last week we welcomed our third MDS Vancouver cohort. It only seems a short while ago when we launched the program with a cohort of “only” 22 students. Now we have 70 new students in the program with another 28 at our UBC Okanagan campus.

One of the strengths of the MDS Vancouver program is the diversity of our students:

  • 70 new students.
  • 41 domestic and 29 international students from Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Ivory Coast, India, Mexico, Puerto Rico, USA, Turkey and Pakistan.
  • 32 women and 38 men (46% women, 54% men).
  • a variety of academic backgrounds, from psychology, neuroscience, business, economics, political science, biology, chemistry, engineering and many more.
  • Nine students have completed another advanced degree (Master’s, PhD, MD) prior to MDS.
  • 60% of the class completed their Bachelor’s degree in 2016 or earlier, with 29% having just graduated in 2018.

We were extremely impressed with the quality and size of the applicant pool this year. The program is becoming more and more competitive but with more spaces opening up at our UBC Okanagan campus as well as a new MDS program with a specialization in Computational Linguistics coming in September 2019 (pending provincial government approval) there will be more opportunities for applicants to join our MDS family.

Speaking of MDS family, we now have 63 alumni, most of whom are working as Data Scientists in a variety of industries, from government to large tech to small start-ups. Although most have settled in the Greater Vancouver area, some are working in Alberta, Ontario and the US (Seattle area, Silicon Valley). Examples of organizations our alumni are working for are Amazon, Microsoft, Translink, BC Stats, Deloitte, Imbellus, Finger Food Studios, Electronic Arts, Canvass Analytics, and many more. In about 3 months we will be surveying our second cohort to discover all the exciting things they are doing and will update the data on our website at https://masterdatascience.ubc.ca/about/students-alumni.

If you are interested in joining the program, the application process for the 2019-2020 cohort will open in December 2018. It is going to be another exciting year!

Milad Maymay is the Director of Program Operations & Student Management for the UBC Master of Data Science program.