Investigating Internship Experiences of Data Science Students for Curriculum Enhancement

An internship promotes the idea of learning through experiencing and has been an important way for data science students to gain practical knowledge and skills for solving real-world data science challenges. However, despite its importance, there has been little work on understanding student internship experiences. To address this knowledge gap, we have conducted a study to find out how the current curriculum has prepared students for their internships, what are the major challenges students have faced in their internships, and how to enhance the curriculum to better prepare students for their internships and jobs. In this paper, we report findings of our study and discuss strategies for improving the curriculum based on student experiences and feedback. Our study provides key insights on student learning experiences that may benefit other data science programs. Our work also constitutes an important step towards establishing a feedback loop that couples internships and jobs with the curriculum, and continuously adapts the curriculum to the fast-evolving techniques and tools used in data science applications.