Online Bachelor of Science in Data Science (BSDS)
Data Science
Program Overview
The world isn’t short on data. It’s short on people who know how to use it.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s online Bachelor of Science in Data Science teaches you to turn raw numbers into meaningful decisions. You’ll learn to extract, clean, and prepare data, then model and analyze it using data-oriented programming languages grounded in statistics and data mining. You’ll also develop visualization skills to make your findings legible to people who aren’t data scientists, because insight that can’t be communicated doesn’t move anything forward.
Program Requirements
The BSDS is a 120-credit program with a customizable, transdisciplinary design. You can stack certificates, add a minor, or pursue a second major — shaping the degree to fit your career goals, not the other way around. Real-world projects and an applied capstone course ensure you graduate ready to work, not just qualified on paper.
What Will I Learn?
The BSDS curriculum builds your ability to work with data at every stage — from collection to communication. By graduation, you’ll be able to:
- Extract, clean, and prepare data from real-world sources for analysis
- Apply data mining and machine learning techniques to identify patterns and generate insights
- Use data-oriented programming languages to model and analyze large datasets
- Build data visualizations that communicate findings clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
- Apply sector-specific knowledge to real-world problems through the capstone course
- Evaluate ethical and policy dimensions of data collection, use, and presentation
- Work across disciplines — connecting data skills to fields like healthcare, finance, geography, and public policy
What can you do with a Data Science degree?
Data science skills apply across practically every industry. BSDS graduates pursue roles including:
- Data Analyst
- Market Researcher
- Data Architect
- Sports Analyst
- Data Engineer
- Business Intelligence Analyst
Median salary for data science roles: $112,590 (BLS)
The skill set built in this program isn’t narrowly specialized; it’s portable. Whether you go into healthcare analytics, financial modeling, education research, or tech, the fundamentals you learn here transfer.
Admission Requirements
- Minimum 2.0 cumulative GPA
- Minimum 1 transfer credit hour (must be earned post-high school graduation)
- Applicants who have earned fewer than 24 credit hours must also submit a high school transcript.
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Key Dates & Deadlines
Featured Courses
Introduction to the essential elements of data science through the examination of data sets drawn from a variety of fields. Explores data collection and management, exploration and visualization of data, modeling, computing, and ethical issues associated with data science. Introduces students to programming through hands-on activities.
Survey of modern algorithms and methods in data science, focusing on how, why, and when various methods work. Includes topics in statistics, machine learning, and optimization.
This course covers the all-important data “wrangling” process, taking data from real-world sources and converting the data into easily-accessible format for analysis. The course covers the steps of the data wrangling process like importing data, tidying data, string processing, HTML parsing, working with dates and times, and text mining. We will consider databases as well as data extracted from documents.
Covers basics of data visualization and exploratory data analysis. This course is project-oriented and focuses on foundational concepts, recent research results, and best practices for combining raw data from a variety of domains with automated analytical methods and interactive visual interfaces to support analytical reasoning.
