Experiential Learning in Data Science Through a Novel Client-Facing Consulting Course

This Innovative-Practice Full Paper presents the curriculum development and our experiences in offering a client-facing consulting course in data science. Data science education has seen rapid growth over the past decade. To provide students with hands-on opportunities to work with real data, many data science programs have advocated for and implemented experiential learning opportunities throughout the curriculum, which has been shown in a wide variety of literature to have many benefits. Most experiential learning opportunities in STEM programs are provided through capstone and engineering design courses; this is becoming increasingly the case in data science programs as well where several universities have developed data science capstone programs in which students work with clients on the client’s real-world data sets. While client-sponsored capstone projects are an exemplar of experiential learning, they may pose major challenges to implement and can be particularly resource-intensive for institutions; this is especially the case in data science where the legalities of data sharing may come with additional hurdles. Because of this, we were motivated to develop a novel client-facing data science consulting course that provides a unique experiential learning scenario to both undergraduate and graduate students while requiring much fewer resources and legalities. In our novel data science consulting course, groups of students work directly with real clients in a consulting clinic setting to provide data science guidance and short-term help with data science challenges. Through this process, students learn about the diversity of real-world problems in data science, how to lead consultations with clients effectively as a team, how to frame data science challenges and research possible solutions, and how to communicate solutions to clients in reports and presentations. We leveraged best practices in consulting courses developed in business school settings to design our course. Additionally, the consulting course serves as a community service initiative whereby researchers, clinicians, non-profit and government workers, and industry professionals benefit from the advice and short-term help provided through consultation. In this paper, we report how our consulting course is set up, how clients from both within and outside the university can seek help at the consulting clinic, and how the structure of the course enables students to have firsthand experience working on many real-world data science problems with clients. Finally, we discuss how student performance is assessed in this course, the lessons learned from offering this course, and recommendations for other data science programs in universities that wish to design similar courses.