The Data Science Postgraduate Project provides students in the Masters of Data Science program with work integrated learning (WIL) with industry and non-profit organisations. They conduct data science focused projects via (remote) placements with their host organisations.

The students are typically in their final year of a 2 year Masters program, and would have completed courses and subjects in data preprocessing and analysis, data visualisation, machine learning and data mining, cloud computing and data science pipelines. The students may also either studied and have prior backgrounds in social media analysis, text processing, deep learning, forecasting and other data science/data analysis fields.

The students will be placed with a host organisation over a 12-14 week period, work with the host closely from requirements refinement (from initial agreed requirements with the coordinator), approach planning, executing the plan, perform analysis and reporting and passing on deliverables.

The students are expected to work closely with the participating/host company. The deliverables will depend on the project agreed upon with the company, but can include things like dash boards, forcasting/prediction/machine learning models, data proprocessing models and reports on their analysis of the data. The students are expected to devote at least 20 hours a week to the project and to constantly engage with the host company.

Academically wise, the students are expected to develop a plan and timeline after consultation with the company, which they will be assessed on and provided feedback. In addition, the students will prepare a final report about the project and typically align with the report that they deliver to the company. They also are required to present their project and its outcomes to both the company and as part of their assessment.