We teach the state-of-arts scientific developments within data science, as well as business and entrepreneurship, yet we select them to have practical value. The same holds for the master thesis project that takes a whole semester: it needs to deliver a scientific contribution and have a business or societal impact, which are being explicitly assessed.
This practical value is further strengthened by In uk rcs data Action courses in which external organizations provide assignments. This blog post elaborates on how the In Action series of courses operates.
Scaling up In Action
Organizations such as WWF, Deloitte, Floryn, ParkNow, Unilever, and many others participated in the past five years. The challenges the students worked on included both for-profit and non-profit cases.
Over these years, we learned how important it is for students to choose the data challenge and the related organization they would like to work on and balance the difficulty level of these projects.
Meanwhile, we scaled up the real-life data science assignments in the program. Depending on the electives chosen, students can do up to 66 ECTS of courses that actively engage external organizations as the basis for the assignment.