About the Program

The graduate certificate in Data Science and Analytics is designed to serve the advanced educational needs of bachelor’s-prepared professionals who require modern skills for manipulation and organization of their industry data. The advanced certificate program consists of 12 graduate credit hours and is designed to equip graduates with essential data analytics skills and competencies to be effective and competitive in today’s data-driven work environments.

Data science and analytics (DSA) is a fast-growing area leading to excellent job opportunities in a variety of fields, including business, industry, health, government, and education. This interdisciplinary certificate offers recent college graduates and industry professionals the opportunity to build skills as data analysts, without the commitment of pursuing a Master’s degree.

Admission Requirements

All applicants are required to have a minimum overall GPA of 2.50, the campus-wide standard. Applicants are required to have an undergraduate level introductory statistics course and an undergraduate level introductory programming course. Exceptions to these requirements are made on a case-by-case basis by the admission committee and program faculty.

Learning Outcomes

Students will:
1. select and apply an appropriate statistical, mathematical or computational model for a given quandary
2. acquire data from data scraping and open sources and understand the ethical and legal ramifications of data acquisition
3. store, clean, organize, and manipulate real world data from multiple sources
4. compose and present an effective oral, written report or dynamic dashboard, to a lay audience (including storytelling and data visualization) that enhances the audience’s understanding and reveals properties of the data
5. use the appropriate software or programming application (Python, SQL, SAS, SPSS, Excel) to manage and analyze data
6. perform effectively as a member of a team to execute a project and will understand what contributes to team success
7. integrate context specific information into their data manipulation allowing them the flexibility to interpret data from many

Program Requirements

Required Courses (12 credit hours)
DSA 501 DATA ORIENTED COMPUTING AND ANALYTICS 3
DSA 650 DATA STRATEGY AND GOVERNANCE 3
MAT 646 INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICS FOR DATA SCIENCE 3
CIS 512 INTRODUCTION TO DATA SCIENCE AND ANALYTICS 3
Total Credit Hours 12