Leeds Data Science Society

The Leeds Data Science Society is approaching its second birthday this month, and this year looks to be action packed with events just like the two before it. We are happy to have reached nearly 300 subscribed members, and to be sponsored by BlackRock, KPMG and Hiscox Insurance.

The year kicked off with a highly successful welcome event, attended by over 140 people. The welcome event detailed the exciting line up of events for the year to come. The focus is on a range of coding workshops, guest speaker talks and career events, to help prepare members for their future careers as data scientists.

One focus for the society is to show students from all degree backgrounds how relevant Data Science is to their field. On the 19th of October we ran a ‘Give It A Go’ web design workshop with the help of three front end web developers from Sky Betting and Gaming. The goal was to show how accessible coding is even to those who may consider themselves ‘non-technical’. Last week’s guest lecture, “Improving NHS Care Pathways Through Data Science”, is another example of how the society is reaching out to students in different areas such as medicine and bio-science.

Workshops make up the core of what the society offers to equip its members with essential skills for a changing world. The 3 session SQL workshop is currently underway, with 55 keen members learning how to use SQL to manage their data sets. We have a Python bootcamp weekend workshop running on the third weekend in November. Additionally, the society is tackling the gender gap in tech through its offering of an 8 week free coding course in HTML, CSS and web technologies exclusively for female students.

We are involved with the Hiscox National Data Challenge for the 2nd year in a row, after managing to win the challenge last year. We hope that with our strong team we can claim the prize again this year! For the rest of this semester, we have several more workshops, talks and career events lined up. As well as the Python workshop, in November we also have Tableau and R workshops, and will be taking a group to the GreatUniHack hackathon in Manchester to compete against other teams in programming challenges.

It’s been great to get such fantastic turnout to our events this semester, and to see such high member engagement. We are planning an even more exciting line up of events for semester 2, including a full series of Tableau Data Visualisation workshops, and the University’s very own ‘DataHack’ Data Science hackathon!