University of Essex

The details
Course: Data Science with Professional Placement
Start date: October 2022
Study mode: Full-time
Maximum duration: 2 years
Location: Colchester Campus
Based in: Mathematical Sciences
A successful career in data science requires you to possess truly interdisciplinary
knowledge, so we ensure that you graduate with a wide-ranging yet specialised set of skills
in this area. You are taught mainly within our Department of Mathematical Sciences and
our School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, but also benefit from input from
our Essex Business School, and our Essex Pathways Department. Data scientists are
required in every sector, carrying out statistical analysis or mining data on social media, so
our course can open the door to almost any industry, from health, to government, to
publishing.

Placement year

MSc Data Science with Professional Placement offers a unique opportunity for you
to gain relevant work experience within an external business or organisation, giving
you a competitive edge in the job market and providing you with key contacts within
the industry. The placement is undertaken between the taught part of the course and
the individual project. Its aim is to allow you to acquire industry experience and,
especially, develop an appreciation of how the skills acquired in the taught part of the
course can be applied to real world problems.

You’ll be responsible for securing your own work placement, but if you change your
mind and decide not to do your placement, or if you are not able to secure a
placement, you can start your dissertation earlier and complete your Masters in the
first year.

International & EU entry requirements – For India

A degree with an overall grade of between 50 to 55% OR 5.3 to 5.8/10 OR 2.12 to

2.32/4 depending on the degree institution.
Modules
COMPONENT 01: COMPULSORY

Research Methods
(15 CREDITS)

Looking to build your research capabilities? This module will equip you with the
principal research tools for your postgraduate course in Mathematical Sciences,
including practice in the mathematical word-processing language LaTeX.
View Research Methods on our Module Directory
COMPONENT 02: COMPULSORY W ITH OPTIONS

Option from List A

(15 CREDITS)

COMPONENT 03: COMPULSORY WITH OPTIONS

Option from List B

(15 CREDITS)

COMPONENT 04: COMPULSORY

Modelling Experimental Data

(15 CREDITS)

Can you calculate confidence intervals for parameters and prediction intervals for
future observations? Represent a linear model in matrix form? Or adapt a model to fit
growth curves? Learn to apply linear models to analyse data. Discuss underlying
assumptions and standard approaches. Understand methods to design and analyse
experiments.
View Modelling Experimental Data on our Module Directory
COMPONENT 05: COMPULSORY

Applied Statistics
(15 CREDITS)

How do you apply multivariate methods? Or demographical and epidemiological

methods? And how do you apply sampling methods? Study three application areas
of statistics – multivariate methods, demography and epidemiology, and sampling.
Understand how to apply and assess these methods in a variety of situations.
View Applied Statistics on our Module Directory
COMPONENT 06: COMPULSORY

Machine Learning
(15 CREDITS)
Humans can often perform a task extremely well (e.g., telling cats from dogs) but are
unable to understand and describe the decision process followed. Without this
explicit knowledge, we cannot write computer programs that can be used by
machines to perform the same task. “Machine learning” is the study and application
of methods to learn such algorithms automatically from sets of examples, just like
babies can learn to tell cats from dogs simply by being shown examples of dogs and
cats by their parents. Machine learning has proven particularly suited to cases such
as optical character recognition, dictation software, language translators, fraud
detection in financial transactions, and many others.
View Machine Learning on our Module Directory
COMPONENT 07: COMPULSORY WITH OPTIONS

Option(s) from List A or List B

(30 CREDITS)

COMPONENT 08: COMPULSORY

Mathematics Careers and Employability

(0 CREDITS)

What skills do you need to succeed during your studies? And what about after
university? How will you realise your career goals? Develop your transferable skills
and experiences to create your personal profile. Reflect on and plan your ongoing
personal development, with guidance from your personal advisor within the
department.
View Mathematics Careers and Employability on our Module Directory
COMPONENT 09: COMPULSORY

Professional Placement
(0 CREDITS)

This module enables you to undertake a placement with an external Placement

Provider. You will acquire effective work-based skills specific to your chosen field,
and gain a detailed understanding of work processes. It’s an opportunity to put
taught skills into practise and develop a network of industry professionals. Your
placement is a sought-after contribution to your employability, giving you the tools
employers look for in skilled graduates.
View Professional Placement on our Module Directory
Placement

You will complete a professional placement between the taught part of the course
and the individual project. This professional placement allows you to gain work
experience during your postgraduate studies.
Teaching
 Core components can be combined with optional modules, to enable you to gain either
in-depth specialisation or a breadth of understanding

 Learn to use LATEX to produce a document as close as possible to what professional

mathematicians produce in terms of organisation, layout and type-setting

 Our postgraduates are encouraged to attend conferences and seminars on a Thursday

afternoon.
Assessment
 Courses are assessed on the results of your written examinations, together with continual
assessments of your practical work and coursework
Dissertation
 You will be provided with a list of dissertation titles or topics proposed by staff and it may
be possible to propose a project of your own

 Most dissertations are between 10,000 and 30,000 words in length. However, these are
guidelines, not mandatory word counts

 Close supervision by academic staff.

International fee
£19,740
Year 2 fee is currently calculated at 40% of the Year 1 fee for the year in which the placement
occurs.
Fees will increase for each academic year of study.
 University Of Hertfordshire
Why choose Herts?

 Industry Accreditation: BCS accreditation will be sought once this award has its first group
of graduates in 2020.
 Work Placement Opportunities: You will gain real industry experience during a one-year
work-placement.
 Employment Prospects: Graduates in our department are now data scientists, data
engineers, and data analytics consultants working for organisations including BT, IBM, and
Microsoft.

Admission

For admission to MSc Data Science and Analytics, the normal requirement is a good Honours Degree
(or equivalent) in computer science or cognate discipline. The choice of award title students may
be accepted on to will be determined by the award applied for and the prior learning of the student
as demonstrated by the transcript for existing qualifications held by the applicant.

What job can I get?

Our master's programme is designed to give Computer Science graduates the specialist,
up-to-date skills and knowledge sought after by employers, whether in business, industry,
government or research.

The MSc Data Science and Analytics course will equip students with the knowledge and
practical skills in data science and analytics from the foundations of data science in
mathematics and programming, data mining, machine learning, to data analytics
applications.

Successful graduates may pursue a career as a data scientist or data engineer, data
analytics consultant, digital marketing manager across a wide range of sectors.

Work placement

The course offers you the opportunity to work for one year in a highly professional and
stimulating environment. You will be a full-time employee in a company earning a salary
and will learn new skills that can't be taught at University. During the placement, you will
be able to gain further insight into industrial practice that you can take forward into your
individual project.

We will provide excellent academic and personal support during both your academic and
placement periods together with comprehensive careers guidance from our very
experienced dedicated Careers and Placements Service.

Although the responsibility for finding a placement is with you, our Careers and
Placements Service maintains a wide variety of employers who offer placement
opportunities and organise special training sessions to help you secure a placement, from
job application to the interview. Optional one-to-one consultations are also available.

In order to qualify for the placement period you must pass all the first 60 credits of your
study in your first attempt.

Professional Accreditations

This new version of the programme has been carefully designed to achieve appropriate
levels of accreditation, and BCS accreditation will be sought after the award title has its
first group of graduates in 2020.

What will I study?

Classes consist of lectures, small group seminars, and practical work in our well-equipped
laboratories. We use modern, industry-standard software wherever possible. There are
specialist facilities for networking and multimedia and a project laboratory especially for
masters students. In addition to scheduled classes, you will be expected a significant
amount of time in self-study, taking advantage of the extensive and up-to-date facilities.
These include the Learning Resource Centres, open 24x7, with 1,500 computer
workstations and wifi access, Studynet our versatile online study environment usable on
and off campus, and open access to our labs.

International Students
Full time

 £15500 for 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 inclusive

*Tuition fees are charged annually. The fees quoted above are for the specified year(s)
only. Fees may be higher in future years, for both new and continuing students. Please see
the University's Fees and Finance Policy (and in particular the section headed "When
tuition fees change"), for further information about when and by how much the
University may increase its fees for future years.
 University of Teesside
Course overview

Data scientists use a range of computational and statistical techniques to

unlock insight from data and solve complex problems. This emerging
profession sits at the cutting-edge of computer science and graduates are
increasingly in demand from industry. This innovative data science course
equips you with the specialist skills and knowledge to make an immediate and
meaningful contribution to a range of industry environments.

You are taught by expert staff from our machine intelligence research group,
ensuring that you have access to the very latest thinking from the field of data
science. You have the opportunity to contribute to live research and to progress from
postgraduate study to postdoctorate research.The School has a proven record of
successful research, consultancy and enterprise projects with industry in the field of
data science, which means that staff have relevant real-world case studies to draw
upon for teaching materials.

There are three routes you can choose from to gain an MSc Data Science:

 full-time - 2 years with advanced practice (September and January start)

Course structure

Core modules

Big Data and Business Intelligence

You develop your ability to design and implement database, big data and analytics
applications to meet business needs. A case study is used to follow the system
development lifecycle. You develop a plausible application from inception to
implementation for a real-world scenario.

You investigate the issues and technologies associated with implementing and
supporting large scale databases and the services that are needed to maintain and
access a repository of data. Investigations are undertaken in a number of areas
including big data, data warehouses, integrating legacy data, data management and
approaches that support the modelling and visualisation of data for a range of use
views.

Computing Master's Project

You undertake a major, in-depth, individual study in an aspect of your course.
Normally computing master’s projects are drawn from commercial, industrial or
research-based problem areas. The project involves you in researching and
investigating aspects of your area of study and then producing a major deliverable,
for example software package or tool, design, web-site and research findings. You
also critically evaluate your major deliverable, including obtaining third party
evaluation where appropriate.
The major deliverable(s) are presented via a poster display, and also via a product
demonstration or a conference-type presentation of the research and findings. The
research, project process and evaluation is reported via a paper in the style of a
specified academic conference or journal paper. The written report, the major
deliverable and your presentation of the product are assessed.

The project management process affords supported opportunities for goal setting,
reflection and critical evaluation of achievement.

Data Visualisation
The field of information visualisation has expanded rapidly with many designers
generating new forms of charts through which to view quantitative data. This module
explores the range of charts available from the traditional such as bar charts and pie
charts, to the more novel such as stream graphs, tree maps, sunbursts, and force
diagrams, and examines their mathematical properties.

By accurately representing quantitative data using appropriate charts, the intended

audience can make their own interpretations of the data and identify emerging
patterns and themes that are more readily recognisable in chart form than in the form
of raw data.

Interactive Visualisation
Dynamic, interactive visualisations enable the reader to explore the data for
themselves through a variety of perspectives. Static visualisations are excellent for
print medium but are restricted to showing a single perspective and do not handle
multidimensional datasets well. Using an interactive graphic the reader can zoom in
on sections of the data which are of interest, explore more than one dimension at a
time, and sort and filter to discover new patterns and themes within the data.
Particularly useful is the ability to provide a macro/micro view of the same data, ie a
big picture view of the full dataset from which the reader can then ‘drill down’ into the
lower level detail.

This module uses the javascript library for Data-Driven Documents (D3js) for
creating animated, dynamic graphics for the web, and looks at other alternatives
available.

Machine Learning
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science concerned with computational
techniques rather than performing explicit programmed instructions. You build a
model from a task based on observations in order to make predictions about unseen
data. Such techniques are useful when the desired output is known but an algorithm
is unknown, or when a system needs to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

You explore statistics and probability theory as the fundamental task is to make
inferences from data samples. The contribution from other areas of computer
science is also essential for efficient task representation, learning algorithms, and
inferences procedures. You gain exposure to a breadth of tasks and techniques in
machine learning.
Assessment is an in course assessment (100%).

Research Methods
You gain the knowledge and skills to understand the research process in computing
and digital media, and the necessary skills to undertake your masters project. You
learn how to use and critically evaluate previous academic research, and to generate
good evidence material to justify their professional practice. This involves you
learning about different research strategies and data generation methods and how
they fit into the development lifecycle and the evaluation of the user experience, the
use of the academic research literature, and research ethics.

Assessment involves you preparing a research proposal which can form the basis of
your master's project.

Statistical Methods for Data Analytics

You develop necessary knowledge and practical understanding of the main
statistical techniques. You explore quantitative and qualitative data analysis
techniques, reflecting scientific and social science methods. You focus on correlation
testing, regression, data categories, normalization - the tools needed, rather than the
philosophical approaches. You understand how to apply valid techniques and
interpret the results in preparation for experimental work.

Your assessment is a single ICA based around a number of case studies that require
you to identify the correct data analysis and modelling processes.

Advanced practice (2 year full-time MSc only)

Internship
The internship options are:

Vocational: spend one semester working full-time in industry or on placement in the

University. We have close links with a range of national and international companies
who could offer you the chance to develop your knowledge and professional skills in
the workplace through an internship. Although we cannot guarantee internships, we
will provide you with practical support and advice on how to find and secure your
own internship position. A vocational internship is a great way to gain work
experience and give your CV a competitive edge.

Research: develop your research and academic skills by undertaking a research

internship within the University. Experience working as part of a research team in an
academic setting. Ideal for those who are interested in a career in research or
academia.
Entry requirements

You will normally have a first degree in related discipline (2.2 minimum) or relevant
experience or equivalent qualifications. Acceptable subjects include artificial
intelligence, computer forensics, computer science, computing, information
technology, artificial intelligence, data science, computer forensics and digital
forensics.

In addition, international students will require IELTS 6.0 or equivalent.

Fee for international applicants

£13,000 a year
£7,500 a year with Advanced Practice
More details about our fees for international applicants

 Length: within 1 year (September start), 16 months (January start) or 2 years

with advanced practice (September or January start)

 Start date: September or January

London South Bank University