Last semester we asked you to fill out an anonymous form for us, so we could find out about the interests of the student body – and here are the results!
Firstly, we would like to thank all of you who participated and we are especially happy that people from all semesters were able to fill out the form! This gives us a varied perspective that is more representative of the majority of DH students!
Work-study balance and issues
When looking through the results, we found out that the vast majority of students in DH are working at least part-time. In fact, roughly 80% of you have work obligations as nearly ⅔ take up more than 10 hours of weekly working time. This is quite important to know, as many of you have stated that working and studying in this programme is quite difficult due to scheduling problems! We understand that most of you have to work due to financial or personal reasons and will therefore address this issue. It also seems important to say that these scheduling problems were not only mentioned by working students, but also impacted others since some of the main courses were taking place at the same time and therefore blocking each other. Specifically for the introductory or skills courses, this should not be happening. We have been assured, however, that at least for the main courses by SPL13 this should not be the case in future semesters.
We are also thankful for all of the other issues you mentioned to us that you have had during your time in the programme and would like to say that we are doing our best to resolve them and/or address them to the respective contact points.
Course selection and interests
When it comes to what courses the students would like to attend and what skills you are looking forward to the most, the answer seems fairly easy: nearly all of you would like more courses on technical skills as well as programming and practical methods. Unsurprisingly, topics like R, SQL, Java, NLP, ML etc. were mentioned multiple times to us and Languages and Literature was the most popular cluster by a large margin. There were suggestions for more courses that could be added to our curriculum, which we will gladly forward, as well as a high interest in access to self-study platforms.
Altogether, your wishes seem to be: more courses related to workplaces (GLAM institutions, data analysis etc.) and more practical skills and computer techniques like Transkribus, SQL, ML, Statistics etc. Our course selection is getting bigger with each semester and hopefully these wishes can be fulfilled soon.
Events and updates
Of course we are also happy to keep you updated on news like events we organise or events offered by university. Generally speaking, we would also like to ask you to look through the emails that you receive through the Masters@Data Science Uni Vienna (which you would receive as emails by Petra Schönfelder) for more information, events, jobs etc. We would like to be a contact point for communication as well as your issues, however, we do represent the student side and are not an organisational structure of the University and therefore we are not always involved in these conferences and other opportunities.
We also suggest subscribing to mailing lists for information on conferences, events, and job opportunities. Some of them we have listed in our FAQ at the bottom. If there are mailing lists we are missing, please reach out to us!