Victoria Farkas
MDS Vancouver, Class of 2026
During her third year of her Bachelor’s of Behavioural Neuroscience degree at UBC, Victoria Farkas joined a datathon and it helped her realize she could combine her domain knowledge with technical know-how to work in a career that both interested and challenged her.
One of the deciding factors that led Farkas to apply to the UBC Master of Data Science (MDS) program in Vancouver was having a MDS alumni in her datathon group.
“I worked in a datathon group with an MDS alum (Lauren Zung) who came from the same undergrad degree as myself, and her experience with MDS and career goals sounded really appealing to me. I also knew that I wanted to formalize and expand on my technical knowledge and get myself career-ready as quickly and effectively as possible, so the 10-month accelerated format was perfect for me,” Farkas said.
One aspect about the MDS program that stood out for Farkas was the diverse course topics and the focus on breadth over depth of knowledge. In particular, Farkas enjoyed the advanced machine learning and statistics courses (DSCI 575 (Advanced Machine Learning) and DSCI 553 (Statistical Inference and Computation II)).
“The ML courses covered a lot of interesting topics, such as building our own neural networks, which I felt came in handy when talking with industry professionals or seeing what employers were looking for. I also just enjoy statistics, so being able to learn more about Bayesian stats was great,” she noted.
When it comes to emergence of LLMs and AI, Farkas felt the MDS program did well with incorporating LLMs and AI usage into the curriculum. She added that there was also encouragement to understand how they can be helpful as tools while keeping their limitations in mind, which was very in touch with how most people use LLMs in the workplace.
Farkas added with the amount of material taught in MDS that it would be difficult to learn all of this online or by oneself.
“I think even the most disciplined person can only do and get so much out of a completely remote degree,” she said. “It was also helpful to be able to speak to professors face to face when needed and to form the connections that I have. With the tech job market being what it is, you do have to find that balance of technical know-how and soft skills/networking, and an online education can’t really help you with the latter.”
In addition, Farkas said that MDS is great for students who don’t have the traditional technical degree backgrounds.
“While it is important to have a grasp on the fundamentals before beginning, the program does a great job of structuring the content with an understanding that the first block or so may be spent catching some people up to speed before moving into the more advanced topics. I also may be biased, but I think MDS is the most fruitful when combined with a non-technical degree, as traditional data scientists were trained up from their respective niches. It can definitely give you a leg up when applying for certain jobs,” she explained.
Since the program has ended, Farkas as landed a position as a biostatistician for Providence Health Care.
As she begins her career in the field, Farkas said the program helped her understand the breadth of skills and knowledge data scientists are expected to have.
“The coursework's focus on reproducibility, teamwork, and safe data and programming practices was also great, since these are things beyond the raw skills and knowledge that employers really value,” she added.
Victoria’s Top 3 Tips on Succeeding in the MDS Program:
- Make friends. They can be a great support system.
- Don't focus on perfection and comparison; focus on your own goals and why you're in MDS.
- Explore opportunities and initiatives outside of coursework, since being a student at UBC opens up so many networking and hackathon events you can't get elsewhere.