From July 8 to July 10, 2024, Katie Burak, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Statistics, led the Data Science Camp for Girls at UBC Vancouver Campus. This three-day camp aimed to promote and uplift women and gender minorities in data science, addressing the 'leaky pipeline' phenomenon in which women are disproportionately lost from STEM fields as they progress in their education and careers.
Each day featured morning classroom sessions combining lectures and group activities, followed by afternoon worksheet sessions where students applied their new knowledge to real-world data. The camp's success was evident from the wrap-up survey results, which included responses from 20 participants. 80% of students expressed a high interest in further learning about data science, and 100% rated their overall experience positively. Testimonials highlighted the camp's empowering environment and its role in strengthening participants' interest in STEM careers. One participant noted, "I think the concept of having an all-girls camp for STEM is very empowering and has made me keen on pursuing this field." Another shared, "It has definitely opened my mind to how fascinating data science and statistics are, and I'd definitely be open to doing something similar in the future."
The curriculum covered a range of topics: the basics of Jupyter and R, data wrangling and visualization, statistical inference and sampling, and machine learning fundamentals. For more details, please visit Prof. Katie Burak’s GitHub repository containing the camp content, made publicly available to support similar outreach events: https://github.com/katieburak/girls-in-DS