Robert Fales isn't a data scientist. He only signed up for the data science-focused sociology class because he wanted to work with Professor David Harding, a leader in the social science field. But once Fales started using data science tools to analyze education inequality data, he knew he'd be using them to transition sociology from his major to his career.
“That class really opened the door for me to understand how we take sociology – all the journal articles we read in the area that we're interested in – and use that to work in the policy sector,” said Fales(link is external), a community college transfer student who graduated from UC Berkeley in May and now works as a research assistant at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research(link is external). “That class made it really digestible and really easy to connect the dots.”