With a background in Physics, I chose this Master's mostly because I wanted to understand what is going on behind the Machine Learning and Data Science tools that are a big part of everyday life for many scientists.

A distinguishing feature of this intensive program is that it requires a great deal of independent research in teams, which resembles the natural business environment. This teaching approach allows students to develop into professionals who are able to find efficient solutions for different and unfamiliar problems...

The programme’s strong focus on introducing the mathematical tools in areas like statistics and optimization was absolutely crucial to my understanding of Data Science methods and empowered me to choose the right set of tools each time...

The program facilitated intense teamwork which truly acted as a “catalyst” for learning. I gained important knowledge through interacting with my classmates, who came from a wide range of academic backgrounds. They motivated me throughout the program and collaborating with them made the whole year a lot of fun as well...

I never thought I could learn so much in such a short time. The Master's in Data Science at BSE was an exciting and fast-paced opportunity for me to acquire foundational knowledge in a broad range of subjects...

Looking back at my year at the BSE, I wish that it didn't fly by as fast as it did. There were so many exciting things to learn and discover, be it in statistics, machine learning or in and around Barcelona, that it felt like the Masters was over before it even started. Sure, the program was truly challenging but also immensely rewarding. Most importantly, I realized that Data Science is a fluid field, for which the Masters provides an excellent foundation enabling me to continue learning and pushing my own boundaries. Academically the program covers a wide array of topics, allowing everyone to find and thrive in their own field of interest. Personally, I found my passion at the intersection of data- and life sciences through a project at the BSE Data Science Center, which ultimately led me to transition into this exciting area...

For me, the BSE Data Science master’s was a game-changer. The program taught me the foundations of Data Science, equipping me with the necessary tools to make a thoughtful and modern empirical analysis. Importantly, the inspiring courses and faculty raised my curiosity and ambition to identify and explore novel avenues to integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence into economic research. The program also gave me the confidence to code. Having studied economics before, I had no significant exposure to programming. Now, I look for algorithms I can implement, or for some interesting internet data, I can web scrape...

The Master's in Data Science at BSE was a turning point in my career. It allowed me to expand my field of competencies in statistics and programming. Without a doubt, it was an intensive and demanding program but absolutely rewarding, made even more so by the fact of fostering extraordinary friendships with ambitious students from the most diverse backgrounds. After the master, I was flooded with job offers and decided to work at a leading consulting firm specialized in Machine Learning and AI solutions.

The BSE Data Science masters was without a doubt the most academically rigorous and intense period I've experienced. It provided me with a very solid foundation to approach and solve problems in a statistically sound way. Personally, I feel like I've gained lifelong friends in my fellow coursemates and professors, who helped me and supported me emotionally and academically throughout what was a very challenging year. Professionally, it equipped me with the skills I needed to make a switch and pursue a career in Data Science. In addition, the practicum programme provided good networking opportunities - I found my current job through one of the Data Scientists at Schibsted, a practicum partner to the BSE programme, who was looking to hire for his new firm.

...Not only our faculty was inspiring, but my classmates were all original, extremely clever and diverse people. I have never been in such a great group of people, and I truly believe that one of the most unique attribute of the program is the people (both faculty and students) that it brings together. The program was designed in a way that it always encouraged cooperation among us, and it never turned into a competition. We suffered a lot together, helped and inspired each other, laughed, partied and still keep in touch...I believe that working with data and data science is not only a set of skills that one can acquire on the go. It is a rather a mindset of understanding problems, forming questions and figuring out a solution. The program at BSE keeps that in focus by providing strong theoretical foundations that gave me a professional confidence...

For me the time at BSE was truly amazing. Besides receiving excellent academic training in Data Science I gained much from working with such talented, motivated and passionate professors and students on a daily basis. I never thought that learning this much in just 9 months was actually possible – experiencing that it motivates me every day now to push myself a little more. Moreover, it was often fun (despite being exhausting), I made some really good friends and fell in love with beautiful Barcelona.

Living in Barcelona for a year was a dream. Through the program I gained confidence in applying data science to real world problems and worked with talented and thoughtful machine learning researchers. But, what made me happiest was the friendships I fostered with like-minded ambitious people from around the world.

I pursued the Data Science master at BSE in a moment when I needed to step up my level of quantitative analysis and research. It has the peculiarity of a small student cohort, which gives a great boost to the interaction with the faculty and all other classmates. With the current hindsight, I can say that the Data Science master provided me enough plug-in tools to make a direct contribution in the work environment, as well as theoretical framework to look at less trivial problems. I learnt a great deal from my classmates about thinking out of the box and helping the team and friends succeeding.

The master taught me first and foremost how to conquer knowledge myself and a way-of-thinking. The field of Machine Learning is extremely dynamic, therefore, the skill to teach yourself is much more valuable that actual knowledge. In the end, working under constant pressure without losing enthusiasm, still enjoying life, and building up amazing friendships was the mixture for a fantastic year...

The Master's in Data Science is an exceptional program. World class experts and a gold standard curriculum aside, it demands creativity and encourages exploration of individual interests in both technical skills and applications. The result is an incredibly inspiring and collaborative environment where you are pushed to use and combine individual strengths to innovate, and learn not only from the lecturers but also your peers. In the end everyone graduates with unique but equally impressive skillsets and initiate their careers in a highly diverse array of fields. I really look forward to continuing to learn from the people that I shared the most rewarding year of my life with yet.

The BSE Data Science Master’s program enabled me to follow my dream and to transition from Economics to Computational Neurosciences. The program provides the perfect structure to acquire deep theoretical insights as well as fundamental skills required to execute a complete data-driven project. BSE's unique learning environment, selection of outstanding students as well as the world leading expertise of the faculty provide an unforgettable experience in one of the worlds most exciting cities. I recommend the program to anyone who is hard working and fascinated by pattern recognition as well as scalable automated solutions.

The Master's in Data Science provided me with tools to conduct economic analysis with cutting-edge data analysis techniques. I really appreciated the possibility in the BSE Master's to explore the topics that we found most interesting, and work on collaborative projects which made clear the practical implications of what we learned. A big plus was also that the teaching staff encourage collaboration over competition, which is particularly nice given the diversity of student backgrounds.

As someone with an IT background who already took some machine learning courses in my bachelor degree at the University of Edinburgh, the BSE data science program mainly attracted me because of its well-balanced mix of statistics, applied IT, and economics - something I didn’t find in any other program at that time. I enjoyed many aspects of the program - the variety of offered courses, the close contact with the professors and lecturers, and fellow students from with so many different backgrounds and nationalities you become friends with. Even though I am currently not (yet) working as a data scientist, I still feel I can apply much of the obtained skill set in my current job and even in my daily life, for example to critically question conclusions someone has drawn based on some data, to visualize data in a way that effectively conveys information, or simply to understand the value and potential of a given data set.

The program is not easy! But it is incredibly rewarding. I arrived with little background in statistics, computing or economics but the fast paced and challenging nature of the course meant that I came out the other side having learnt a wide range of topics, in detail, which I had never covered before...The program completely opened up a new area of employment that I hadn't previously even considered. I now feel confident and excited by the direction of my career path which started at the BSE. There is also an incredible careers service within BSE, who are always available to give useful advice and guidance.

The Master's in Data Science at BSE had a positive impact from an academic and personal perspective and it gave me a strong competitive advantage as a Ph.D. student in Economics. As a social scientist, I gained a set of incredibly useful tools for research in applied fields. As a statistician, I acquired knowledge and, more importantly, the language useful for more theoretical-oriented research. Today I collaborate with faculties and students in different departments and the ability to speak the different languages of statisticians, computer scientists and social scientists is a powerful tool that only this master could give me...

The Master's in Data Science was a great learning experience for me. The classes had a rigorous mix of in-depth theory behind machine learning and statistical models as well their practical applications and how to deal with real world datasets. The well-rounded course structure encompassed the breadth of modern data science from basic statistics all the way to NLP and deep learning which makes this program unique...

The BSE Master's in Data Science gave me solid practical skills in statistics and computing that have proved enormously helpful in pretty much every project I have worked on since then...Since the program, I worked for two years at a research institute combining public policy and data science, and I'm now doing a PhD at Columbia University. In my research I am hoping to combine the data science I learned on the Master's with the social science that I learned during my undergrad to come up with some innovative solutions to problems in the field of sustainability.

...The Barcelona days have helped me in understanding more about myself, my ambitions and future plans. Academically, I am very happy to have chosen this course, because I am convinced that it completed my formation in a quite unique way. I really enjoy studying per se, so I value the Master even at a purely cultural level. On a professional point of view, I feel that I still did not exploit fully the potential knowledge and expertise gained at BSE, due to the fact that with my PhD studies I came a bit back towards theoretical Math. At the same time though, I used some theoretical knowledge acquired at BSE both in my research and for teaching purposes...

I chose the BSE Master's in Data Science because I was impressed by the faculty and the program of courses. It was important to me the program emphasized mathematical theory. It’s relatively easy to teach yourself data visualization, coding and to apply different machine learning algorithms - so I knew it was important to focus on the “hard stuff” while in school. For me this would be the mathematical theory and proofs behind why the models and methods work.

The program was a great occasion to meet people who are also passionate about finding the proper answer to complex mathematical and computational problems. I am still often in touch with some of them. I believe the program in one year gave us strong theoretical foundations, and allowed us to be autonomous in research or engineering environments. I was involved in many projects including my master thesis, on what I believe was an innovative subject. These works played a big role for many job interviews after the master.

I was part of the first cohort from the Master's in Data Science (2014-2015). It allowed three things: 1) time for the Data Science market and how it will evolve in the next 3 years, thanks to its holistic approach, merging methodologies, techniques and technologies 2) Go beyond just implementing (coding) ML solutions for problems, by allowing me to push at the same time for theoretical and methodological soundness. 3) Provided new friends (fellow alumni from that first cohort) that I have the pleasure to enjoy in my everyday life at my current job.

Every great thing starts a little scary, doesn't it? It seems like only yesterday I was stepping into the BSE study room for the first time, and also just like yesterday that I heard my name called for the master thesis presentation. But what I have so vivid in my memory is the hope that this master would change my career path. And it did. Attending the Data Science master courses gave me the right mix of skills that any employer would value. Not long after graduating, I found myself with 5 very interesting job offers to choose from, any one of which would have given me the opportunity to dig deeper into machine learning, text mining, data visualization, and the statistical techniques I studied at the BSE. If I had the chance, I would do it all over again!

...Although there are nowadays plenty of data science programs and online courses for someone to get a training on the field, I found BSE's approach to Data Science unique, namely the combination of robust statistical/ML theory, optimization and economics, with additional lectures on how to apply Data Science in practice. The basics of ML/Stats are essential but the optimization and economics behind data science is what really distinguishes the BSE Data Science Master, offering a profound background on how to develop the models, but also how to use them to take the most meaningful decisions in the optimal way depending on the context, and for this reason, the BSE Data Science master is a category on its own...

Right after graduating from the Master's in Data Science I had a wide variety of job offers as a data scientist. The data sector is growing quickly, and many companies in Barcelona are starting to realize how important it is to have a Big Data department. It was very encouraging to see that my efforts were so recognized.

The reason I applied to the Data Science program is because I wanted to make a career shift. I felt that with all the hype around data science I needed a structured way to gain real knowledge in the field. I believe that the program was a perfect fit for me. Both the theoretical knowledge and practical skills I gained were exactly what I aimed for. We were challenged by the professors constantly and there was also a healthy amount of competition but the experience I gained made it completely worth the effort. A huge plus for me was that I got to do my internship at Telefonica Research which was an amazing place to learn about cutting-edge deep learning research. Also, I loved to live and be a student in Barcelona.