All students at Carolina.

To declare any minor or major you must contact Academic Advising.

Five courses in total, three core requirements and two electives.

No, you may not count a course satisfying any of the core requirements as one of the two electives for the minor.

No, only ONE course from each of the core requirements can be counted towards the minor. This does not mean that you may not take two or more classes among those listed under the same core requirement (e.g., if your major requires that), but only one of them will count towards your Data Science Minor.

Yes, you may choose both your electives from the same department.

Yes, you may pick your two electives from different departments.

No, some electives may have prerequisites that are met by only some of the choices that can be used to satisfy a core requirement. Moreover, some courses may have prerequisites or corequisites that are not part of the minor in any way. Our interactive tool can help you identify all the prerequisites or corequisites that may be needed.

All undergraduate programs at Carolina have rules on the number of courses that can be used to simultaneously satisfy requirements in two or more programs. The general rule is that strictly more than half the credit units in a given program must be satisfied by courses that are counted exclusively towards that program. We suggest you contact your Academic Advisor to make sure you can complete all the necessary requirements.

No. This is a new program that is likely to evolve to include more courses, but for the first year, academic calendar 2021-22, there will be no course substitutions. However, if you think (yyy) should be included in the data science minor, please contact the department offering it so they can propose it to the minor’s administrative committee.

Please contact the Student Services person in the department that offers the class you want to register for. Keep in mind that some departments may have classes that are blocked to students outside of their majors/minors, and/or may require outside students to join a waitlist before allowing them to register.

Some departments block their classes to students outside their majors/minors, so please contact the Student Services person in that department to ask if they make exceptions for students in the Data Science Minor. However, please keep in mind that it may be the case that you simply have not declared the Data Science Minor yet, in which case you should do that first.

Yes, you can. There is a very long list of approved electives for the Data Science Minor, some of which have little or no math prerequisites. However, keep in mind that the core requirements Data & Computational Thinking and Data & Statistical Thinking are quantitative in nature, and some of the options that can be used to satisfy them do have some math prerequisites.

There is a very long list of approved electives, many of which do not require advanced math. To help you find them we have also created an interactive tool, which can help you search through the list and find an area that meets your interests and background.

The Data Science Minor is a multidisciplinary program that involves almost every department in the College of Arts & Sciences, and it encourages students to explore applications of data science in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Not every class approved for the Data Science Minor is an approved class for the STAN minor, or vice versa. To help you navigate through the very long list of approved electives for the Data Science Minor we have created an interactive tool.

No, although STOR 155 and STOR 120 can be used interchangeably as prerequisites for many STOR courses, they are not equivalent for the purpose of satisfying the Data & Statistical Thinking (D&ST) requirement of the Data Science Minor. Students can take both courses for credit.