Features

Degree: Bachelor’s in data science

Data science area of concentration: Biology

Hometown: Syosset, New York

Tyler Trine ’16

Degree: Bachelor’s in data science

Data science area of concentration: Brain and cognitive sciences

Hometown: Wolcott, New York

This summer, two of the data science program’s first new graduates will be headed to Manhattan, to begin working at data discovery and sharing company 1010data.

Anthony Margetic ’16 and Tyler Trine ’16 got their feet wet at the company last summer, when they were interns there.

“It was exciting to be there for just two and a half months,” says Trine. “I want to go along for the ride.”

They’re already off to a roaring start, having devoted themselves to the program the year before it was even launched, structuring their schedules to get prerequisites out of the way before the program began. “It’s been a jam-packed two years,” says Trine.

But those two years have given them a new way of seeing the world. “Data science is a way of thinking,” says Margetic. “You want to get to the questions that no one else is looking for.”

It’s the fluidity and interdisciplinarity of data science that first drew him. “I love learning about all kinds of stuff. I didn’t want to be stuck in one field,” he says.

For Trine, discovering the field of data science was finding an intellectual home for the kind of thinking he was already doing. He had started reading philosophy and picked up a book on semiotics, the study of how we make meaning. The linguistics minor was intrigued by “what it means to be informed,” he says. “It became a preoccupation. I wanted to understand how people do it on a deep level, how we take in rich sources of information intuitively.”

Says Trine, “It used to be that data was scarce, and the main enterprise was squeezing the most out of it. Now we’re data-rich, but still information-poor.” Data scientists like Margetic and Trine hope to change that.

Margetic says that having the phrase “data science” attached to a degree helps set him apart because it highlights a breadth of skills. “If you’re a math person or an engineer, you have a subset of the skills I have as a data scientist.”