Last week, Catholic Central’s Director of Analytics, Brendan Bebb ‘19, spoke to students in Mrs. Amanda Loffler’s Data Science class about the rapidly growing field. 

“It is very fulfilling for me to come back to CC and make such a positive impact on the staff that provided me such a great education growing up. Being able to pay it forward to the students and see how interested they are in data science and how they want to learn and ask questions was really inspiring. It makes me want to interact more with the students and set them up for a great future,” Mr. Bebb stated.  

Mrs. Loffler wanted students to hear from someone who has experience in the field. Also, being so close in age, she thought it would be a good idea for students to hear a story about data science in college and postgraduate years. 

Mr. Bebb spoke to juniors and seniors in the morning, and freshman and sophomores in the afternoon. During his presentation, he discussed how he first heard about data science as a student at Catholic Central, but he did not declare it as his major until his sophomore year in college. 

He also discussed why he picked data science as his major, what his classes were like in college, what the interview process looks like for data science/analyst positions, real-life applications of data science, what graduate school is like, and what his job duties are as the Director of Analytics at Catholic Central. 

“This is a fairly new field, but the rate at which it is increasing is exponential. Data science can be used in literally every field in some shape or form. It was recently named the fastest-growing field in the tech industry. With that comes a lot of opportunity, but also competition. I tried to tell the students that it will be very competitive to get into, but there is always an opening that you can apply for,” Mr. Bebb stated. 

“I had one student that wants to go into construction management ask how I could see data science being utilized in a field like that. We had a great conversation about that. Others wanted to know classes I took at CC that helped me prepare for a data science path. I opened the floor to them and wanted to hear why they wanted to learn about data science, and a lot of them said they have heard about the field being a good one to go into nowadays but did not understand completely why. Other students were very interested in some of my projects that I shared with them, such as my stock market trend predictor, and wanted to learn about the time it would take to learn the skills to do something like that themselves,” he explained. 

“Who knows, teaching a class could be in the cards at some point in the near future. Data science is the intersection between humans and technology. As I always say, you can always find someone with great technical or communication skills, but it is very hard to find someone with both. That's where data scientists separate themselves from the pack. You have to be able to write code and clean up data to identify trends/significant points and then be able to explain in simple terms what these mean to the average Joe,” he concluded.