The course

The importance of Big Data grows year on year, with sectors including healthcare, manufacture, retail, administration and more reliant on the insights that accurate data capture and analysis can provide. Study Data Science and Analytics at Royal Holloway, University of London and you’ll develop the practical skills needed to handle and analyse data in a wide variety of fields, preparing you for a rewarding career in Big Data.

This flexible programme gives you the chance to tailor your learning to your own strengths and interests, with a broad range of optional modules including Online Machine Learning, Methods of Bioinformatics and Microeconometrics providing scope and variety. You’ll be well-equipped to continue your studies at PhD level, which will place you in a strong position to pursue more advanced, research-based roles after graduation.

Skills that you will acquire include the ability to:

• work with methods and techniques such as clustering, regression, support vector machines, boosting, decision trees, and neural networks
• work with structured, unstructured, and time-series data
• work with software packages such as MATLAB and R
• design data processing solutions for data-intensive analytics problems
• work with modern tools for massively distributed data processing, such as Hadoop and Pig, and Cloud Computing tools such as Amazon S3, EC2 and Elastic MapReduce
• design Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) pipelines
• design Data Warehousing and Decision Support System (DSS) solutions
• work with highly-scalable data-storage solutions, such as MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, and other NoSQL Data Stores
• work with data-intensive computing technologies, such as Hadoop MapReduce, Spark, Hive, and Pig
• work with Cloud Computing tools, such as Amazon S3, EC2 and Elastic MapReduce.

Teaching & assessment

Assessment is carried out by a variety of methods including coursework, small group projects, and examinations, the proportions of which vary according to the nature of the modules.

This programme can be taken part-time in day-release mode, allowing you to complete your degree by coming to campus once a week on fixed days.

Your future career

Demand for data scientists is buoyant, in the UK and worldwide, with salaries much higher than other IT professions and at least double the UK average full-time wage. Study Data Science and Analytics at Royal Holloway, University of London and you'll graduate with excellent employability prospects in a range of fields.

Our proximity to the M4 corridor – also known as 'England’s Silicon Valley' – provides excellent networking opportunities with some of the country’s top technology institutions. We bring several companies to our campus throughout the year, both for fairs and for delivering advanced topics seminars, which are an excellent opportunity to learn about what they do and discuss possible placements or jobs.

Our graduates enter into successful careers in academia or in companies or organisations operating in highly competitive areas. In recent years, these have included Amazon, American Express, BGL Group, Bupa, Capita, Centrica, EY, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, JP Morgan, Microsoft, ONS, PWC, QuintilesIMS, Rolls Royce, Shell, UBS, VMware, Xerox and the Z/Yen Group.