"This program gives you access to a lot of technical knowledge and jargon that one would likely struggle to acquire doing their own research. This field moves really fast, so having access to people who are knowledgeable enough to give you the fundamentals while also covering some recent trends is really hard to get anywhere else."
Previous Degree: Bachelor’s of Philosophy, Minor in Social Data Analytics from Simon Fraser University
Program: MDS Computational Linguistics, Class of 2026
On the Social Data Analytics side of my degree, I had a course on computational text analysis, which served as a primer for many of the concepts I would explore in more detail during the MDS Computational Linguistics program. Stuff like sentiment analysis, syntax parsing, word embeddings, topic modelling, etc.
About Saumi Rahnamay
Prior to the MDS Computational Linguistics program, Saumi was finishing his bachelor’s degree at SFU in Philosophy and was exposed to data science and NLP from his minor in Social Data Analytics. After switching away from Philosophy, Saumi started working on a data analyst portfolio to try to land a position as a data analyst but decided he needed more schooling would help him land a position in the field; which is when he decided to apply to the MDS Computational Linguistics program. Outside of MDS Computational Linguistics, Saumi likes to play guitar (electric, classical) with his band. Read Saumi’s story.
