Discovering New Interests

I took computer science as an elective for all four years of high school, and it was something of a love/hate relationship. On the one hand, I loved the challenge of solving problems through code; it felt like a puzzle and was immensely satisfying to get right. On the other, surrounded by classmates who were members of the robotics team and interested in pursuing engineering, I never quite felt sure of myself in the Comp Sci classroom. I just felt like the concepts came more naturally to my peers than they did to me.  

So Computer Science was never something I considered as my main area of study when I came to Penn, but I decided to give it another shot with PSCI 107: Intro to Data Science, a political science class that teaches the programming language R and could also count for my major. I thought the class would provide me with useful data analysis skills to apply both in college and beyond, but I didn’t expect to become so quickly engrossed in the material. Within three weeks of starting to learn R, we were working with real county level election results from presidential elections, and a couple of weeks after that I was creating pretty awesome graphs and visualizations with that same data. Now, in the last weeks of the class, we’re running regression analyses on a survey that measures how favorably people view the Affordable Care Act. These projects perfectly intersected with my interest in politics and policy. Better than any Comp Sci class I took in high school, PSCI 107 showed me how I could apply knowledge of R and data science to real world questions in fields that I’m interested in. It turned a subject that I had been lukewarm about before into something I’m excited to explore more.  

Now, I’m planning to take PSCI 207: Applied Data Science next semester and pursue a minor in Survey Research and Data Analytics, which is an amazing interdisciplinary minor combining data science, statistics, and American politics. With so many options to explore and so much flexibility, you never know when your academic path might change in the College. My advice would be to keep an open mind when considering courses, minors, and even majors; there could be a new passion right around the corner! 

- Lucy K.