In this post I am going to discuss several of the upper-level courses I’ve taken over the course of my BSIS and reflect on their impact on my current career goals and what I’ve taken from them. Some of my classes were incredibly impactful, such as my Data and Text Mining Class, while others were less so, like my Technical Writing class. Some classes I’ve taken are not technically apart of my BSIS degree program but were significant enough to me that I feel the need to mention them, such as my Global Tech Program and my Calculus class.

Course:	Description:	Relevance:
LIS 4805: Predictive Analytics	The course will be focused on case-based problem solving using predictive analytics. The course will cover necessary tools for, concepts, and challenges of predictive analytics. Important concepts will be delivered through videos and reading materials. And finally, your understanding of the course content will be assessed through multiple quizzes, tests, and projects.	This class is awesome! If it thought I really enjoyed Data/Text Mining, this class was the level up from that. I have thoroughly enjoyed the topics discussed in this class, the textbook is hilarious, and the issues we are working with are real and complicated.
LIS 4761: Data and Text Mining	Introduction to Data and Text Mining provides an overview of the field of data mining and text mining. Data mining is a process of finding useful patterns in data. When data mining is used for finding patterns in text data, we call it text mining. Students will learn and apply basic concepts of data & text mining using the open-source programming language R.	Single handedly the most impactful class I have taken throughout my entire BSIS degree. This class was challenging in all the right aways and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone even remotely interesting in data science and machine learning. The algorithms we learned, the packages we used, the processes that were taught were foundational to me and my comfortability in using R. Before this class, I considered myself a python programmer who dealt with using R, but this is the class that made my comfortable and confident using R.
LIS 4730: R Programming	The aim of this course is to teach the participant how to develop workflows going from raw data to graphics and statistical analysis, using the R programming language and its statistical and visualization environment. Over the course of the semester, students will learn the skills to write scripts for data analysis, and compile his/her own R package (which is a collection of R functions, data, and compiled code in a well-defined format).	While the beginning of this class felt like a basic review of R, the last couple weeks have actually been very insightful! It’s actually helping me build a tool for an ongoing publication I’m working on, so that’s super exciting! It took a bit to get there, but in retrospect the review was nice before getting into more complicated topics like S3 and S4 objects or package design.
LIS 4202: Information Behaviors	Information Behaviors presents an introduction to the study of typical information behaviors displayed by individuals and groups in various information need, search and retrieval scenarios in different environments, including the electronic environment	This class is actively helping me now! I am working on another publication that is wholly dependent on Information Seeking Strategies, and this classes foundation is the only reason I have been able to contribute and assist as much with the literature review as I’ve had! This is also the class that showed me what sort of study I would want to do if I ever pursued my master or PhD. With my never aspirations, I should probably go back and read that proposal haha.
ENC 3250: Professional Writing	ENC 3250 provides students with an opportunity to prepare for the kinds of writing they’ll do when they leave the university to join their fields, industries, and disciplines. All of the assignments in this class are modeled after common, real-world writing situations and communication problems you might encounter in any career, focusing on writing as a rhetorical process.	If I hadn’t already earned a degree before pursing my BSIS, this class would have been very helpful. Unfortunately, because in my previous degree a large part of it was nonprofit management, technical writing, and proposal requests, I did not find this class helpful at all, as it was simply a less rigorous review of things I had already extensively learned previously. However, I saw this class helping other immensely, and worked with people who definitely needed this class. So while I may have had no use for it, I understand its importance in the program. I just wish I could have opted out by submitting one of my numerous grant/project proposals I’ve already written haha
IDS 3947: The Global Tech Program	Gain career-related, hands-on experience in your chosen career area of interest (pathway). Noting that “experience” and the ability to demonstrate a range of professional and technical skills are a top focus for employers when recruiting.	Again, this is not apart of the BSIS program, but it was recommended to me by some of the coordinators. Before this program, I knew coding… sort of. And while I would NOT recommend learning SQL, Python, Java and R at the same time, like I did, this is the program that actually made me feel confident in my coding abilities. They also are the ones who made me feel confident in dealing with real world scenarios. I will never remember the invigorating feeling of getting chosen to do Live coding in front of the director of the program, and getting the problem right — That was definitely the moment where I started to believe I could be a data scientist.
MAC 2311: Calculus 1	This course features topics that develop basic mathematical tools used to solve problems in mathematics and the sciences. Topics covered include differentiation, limits, differentials, extremes, and definite and indefinite integrals.	This is my formal plea for the LIS department to add a calculus requirement to its degree program. I know this isn’t currently in the BSIS degree program, but having taking this class right now, I can’t figure out why it isn’t. The topics I’m learning are making the process and purposes of so many other analytical techniques just make sense. The Elbow method for model evaluation is just the Mean Value Theorem and I was so mad when I got to that section in my Calc 1 class, because having that background would have saved me so much headache not 2 months ago. My professor warned me that I’m going to be even more made when I get to Calc 2 and 3, as those topics are deeply rooted and connected to data science. I personally believe this should be a requirement for the Data Science Track.
LIS 3261: Intro to Information Science LIS 3353: IT Concepts for the Information Professional   LIS 4800: Intro to Data Science	LIS 3261, Intro to Information Science is an overview of the history, development, and current state of field of Information Science.   LIS 3353, IT Concepts for Information Professionals is an overview of the history, development, andcurrent state of computer hardware and software from the first computers up to today.   LIS 4800, Students will explore key concepts related to data science, including introduction to R programming, data munging, and applied statistics.	I am going to group these three together in the sense that I don’t quite remember the specific things I studied in these classes, but I do remember that they laid great foundations for things I did in other classes. For example, I remember writing a paper related to social epistemology in LIS 3261 that was perspective changing for me, I remember LIS 3353 giving me the foundation I needed to understand computer hardware and pushed me to write a 20 page paper simply on computer hardware, their functions, and evaluation methods. LIS 4800 was unfortunately a haze that blended with my Global Tech program and my Java class, so I don’t remember a lot of specific assignments, but teach me base R pretty well, even if now I primarily use Tidyverse.

Other courses I’ve taken: LIS 4317 Visual Analytics (Fun, but not difficult enough in my opinion, though I may have accidently taken it too late), LIS 4414 (Fun! Not the path I want to go down in the information field, but vital in reminding me of all the ethical considerations that have to go into data analysis), LIS 3783 Information Architecture (Actually useless, it wasn’t the class I thought it was, and the only thing I took from it was how to craft very specific definitions for mundane words), LIS 4732 Advanced Statistics (I was expecting more from this class and was a little disappointed by the lack of mathematical rigor), and CIS 3360 Principles of Information Security (While not my path anymore, so incredibly helpful for the publication I have been working on with Dr. Dinh and a great technical expansion of my criminology minor!)

There is only one class I took that I did not feel the need to mention above, but feel the need to cite it as single handedly the most harmful class in my BSIS degree program was LIS 2780 Database Design and Concepts. While a lot of my heartache comes from that professor, I am not going to talk about him, and more talk about the structure of that class and why I found it so fundamentally harmful to my coding education: That class was poorly designed on outdated materials that have been minorly tweaked in ways that are incredibly confusing to interpret. This class feels like it is trying to teach an outdated software from the 2000s and hasn’t updated the materials since its conception. It would be one thing to me if this classes topic subsequently redundant, however, database design and SQL are so fundamentally important to data science, that the horrendous introduction to it in LIS 2780 actively harmed me for months after I completed that class. I had to leave USF in order to properly learn SQL, primary key designation, entity relationship diagrams and these concept’s importance to data science.

If there is one class I could forget and relearn somewhere else/in another way, it would be LIS 2780.

I won’t end this reflection on bad note, because pretty much every other class that I took in this program was rich with information and experience, and I’m grateful for all the processes and algorithms I’ve learned. But if I were the BSIS program coordinator, I would seriously consider overhauling and restructuring LIS 2780.