Students should be exposed to multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary higher education programmes in computing and data science to explore possibilities and get insights, say experts.
At a webinar on careers in computing and data sciences, hosted by The Hindu with Sai University on Monday, panelists said it is imperative to have mix-and-match learning models for students like that of Harvard University and MIT.
University’s Founder and Chancellor K.V. Ramani said: “The aim is to bring in global best practices to India. We have established a university with top-notch names around the world. Fifty per cent of our faculty will be international professors and the other half will be Indian professors with international accreditation. Students at Sai University will be able to pick subjects across disciplines like in international institutes.”
Jamshed Bharucha, Founding Vice-Chancellor of Sai University, said, “The university is the first Indian higher education institution that embeds computing science and data science within a liberal undergraduate ecosystem. In this time and age, computing is applied to all professions and all aspects of life and data are everywhere.”
He added that students get to study ‘computing bilinguals’ with which one will learn the language of computing and data science and study another subject like music, public health and environmental issues concurrently to have in-depth knowledge, find correlations and patterns. Students can combine these things to get new data sets, understand and analyse them to get new insights. “With computing bilinguals, students can come up with ways to understand the world better using digital technology,” Prof. Bharucha added.
The data science market is rapidly growing at 30% annually. Within the digital sector, the growth is even faster. This means, more data is created and more analysts are needed — it is a virtual cycle.
Ashank Desai, Founder, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of Mastek pointed out that around one lakh vacancies for data science professionals exist in India at present.
“Data science and data analytics jobs are growing at the rate of 40-45%. A data science professional with three to ten years of experience will get an annual salary of ₹25 lakhs to ₹65 lakhs,” he added.
S. Sadagopan, International Advisory Board at Sai University, said, “Every flower in the university can grow the way it wants to grow and won’t be straight-jacketed.”
