MONICA BROWN, THE MARY T. HILL DIRECTOR OF DATA SCIENCE, LEADS THE DATA SCIENCE PROGRAM IN THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES, ARTS, AND SCIENCES.
Data Science: A New Liberal Arts Key to Many Careers BY MARY PATTOCK ’66
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ST. CATHERINE UNIVERSITY • SPRING 2021
PHOTO/REBECCA SLATER ’10, BY REBECCA STUDIOS
t’s an exciting prospect: a new major surfaces that can get a liberal arts graduate through the door of virtually any field or industry. It’s called data science, and St. Catherine University is positioned at its cutting edge. The data science field sprang up out of a need to make decisions based on ever-expanding data in every imaginable field — from healthcare, artificial intelligence, languages, and political science, to astrophysics, business, sports, and more. The need is so pressing that the job and recruiting site Glassdoor ranks data scientist as the third-best job in America in terms of median base salary, job satisfaction, and availability. Data scientists are in high demand because they can address data so comprehensively. They collect, organize, analyze, visualize, and communicate massive data sets using several disciplines: math, computer science, and statistics. “A lot of companies have a ton of data, but there’s no one to analyze it,” says Tori Hagstrom ’21, who will graduate this spring as one of St. Catherine University’s first data science majors. “It’s a really fresh, brand-new major throughout the entire country, and having St. Kate’s paving the way is really awesome.” Assistant Professor Monica Brown, MS, is the chief architect of St. Kate’s new major. She arrived at the University in 2008 with a master’s degree in statistics and a passion to make the field more appealing and accessible to a broader range of students. “I know statistics can be scary for a lot of people — particularly for young women who may not have been encouraged to think
