First-year students from three of the university’s academic programmes have equipped themselves with at least one tool designed to enhance their knowledge of the fourth industrial revolution in a bid to enrich their academic experience and increase their chances of employment.
Approximately 60 students from Buffalo City Campus’ Management, Local Government Finance and Financial Information Systems (FIS) programmes enrolled in the internationally recognized IBM Data Science course conducted at the STEMcenter at Potsdam Site in May.
’’As a response to the incursion of 4IR in virtually every career field, I encouraged the students to start the process of market relevance through right skilling even from their first year. Although they were not obliged to take up these short courses, as they were not part of their curriculum, over 90% of the students took up the challenge and were taught on Data Science Foundation and Data Science Tools, ’’ said Applied Informatics and Mathematical Sciences lecturer Dr Olutoyin Olaitan.
FIS student, Sinegugu Tshona, lauded the dynamism and vision shown by the university in proactively seeking courses designed to not only enhance the academic experience of a student, but also increasing the employability of its future graduates.
An excited Tshona said: ’’I was very pleased that a new programme was introduced to us, a programme that will help us graduate with additional certification which will help enhance our CVs and give us a better chance to gain employment. ’’
He said the course proved invaluable as has ignited a newly-found curiosity and insight into the world of technology, the internet and information systems and how these tie in to the world of business.
His counterpart, Local Government Finance student Thobeka Madondo, was particularly impressed with the programmes syllabus, which touched on analysis techniques and understanding of fundamentals.
’’From the course I learned statistical analysis techniques like hypothesis testing and clustering. The training also provided me with a comprehensive understating of the fundamentals of data science and knowledge to apply those skills in different fields, ’’ said Madondo.
The course was sponsored by the National Electronic Media Institute of SA (NEMISA) and facilitated by the EC e-Skills CoLab (housed at WSU) director Sibukele Gumbo.
By Thando Cezula