Reflective Essay

The Information Studies program has been a great experience. The focus of the program is on how people interpret and process information. We also determine what is the difference between information, data, and knowledge. This is great for me as a full stack developer working in situations where user experience is important. Gaining insight into the ways in which people utilize and interpret information and data is crucial for the design of interfaces that are intuitive and user friendly. My concentration has been in Data Science and Analytics. While I haven’t fully decided if I would like to change my career focus to data science I have enjoyed learning how I can make more informed decisions by analyzing trends in data. The data science and analytics skills I have learned will also be incredibly useful in creating better user experiences with my web projects.

The main focus of the program is understanding how to manage information resources, such as storage, retrieval, and governance of data. As a student in the program there is a bit of an emphasis information behavior and policy making and its ethical implications. This is where governance of the data is important as well as who is allowed to use and own the data. This would be an instance where you have users browsing a website or application and their usage trends are made available. Who actually owns the data, the user, or the creators of the website?

The data science and analytics field has been interesting to me. It offers a lot to my existing career as well as possess a completely different path that I can follow. It has been really interesting and exciting to learn. I do have concerns about how easy it would be for many of my fellow students and I to get a job as a data analysist. Majority of the concentration requires writing code and building models using R code. However, a search on linkedin.com and indeed.com show that some python knowledge would be needed. Luckily, I have experience with python and use it for my day job, however none of the course work uses python language. It would be very helpful to incorporate some course work with the python coding language. While the fundamentals are similar using a more popular coding language would give students an advantage upon graduating and entering the work force.

Most of the program covered how people used technology and the combination of processing and interpreting information and data. The rest of the program covered statistics and R Lang. All of the course work was interesting. The classes Information behavior and policy and ethics really blend together. I’d suggest any new students take these together as they go hand and hand. Understanding people’s information behavior is important when trying to create policies regarding technology and data. I have only taken classes online and think the course work has been manageable, even for someone who has a full-time job like I do.

Outside of including python programming into the data science concentration, the class offerings have been pretty good. Python is just a more popular language with more support and usage. To me it does not make sense to spend so much time working with a less popular coding language with little jobs using that language. Students paying money to gain an education, would gain more for their money if they learned a language that was required for the jobs they are applying for. While the web development technologies concentration has a couple basic web design classes, It would be nice to see more classes that incorporates the frameworks being used today, not technologies and framework from ten years ago. The rapid growth and change in technology makes it hard for Universities to keep up but it definitely hurts to spend thousands of dollars to attend a University and then still have to go and learn new languages and frameworks in order to find a job upon graduation.

I have one more semester before I graduate from the University of South Florida. I have enjoyed the program but benefit from the work experience to help move into a better position upon graduating. I think that many of my fellow classmates will have a bit of a difficult time finding data analyst positions based on the experienced gained from the program alone. I think that I am undecided if I want to transition into data science position but enjoy the flexibility of my current role in full stack development. This allows me to be able to build tools using my knowledge gained from understanding how people process and utilize data, as well as analyzing the data I may gain from my applications. While I may not change career paths, I will benefit and utilize the skill I have gained here at the University of South Florida.