Data Science Academy Session 2

Wharton Data Science Academy (WDS), launched in 2020, is an intensive pre-college program designed for curious, high-achieving students from around the world. The curriculum mirrors the rigor of upper-level Wharton undergraduate courses, while being taught in a way that is accessible to motivated high school learners. We start from the foundations, including data wrangling and visualization, fundamental probability and statistics (distributions, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing), and core modeling (simple/multiple regression, classification, model assessment). From there, we build steadily toward modern machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The curriculum has been evolving; we update modules with state-of-the-art topics such as neural networks and large language models (LLMs). Throughout, we emphasize not only technical skills, but also the responsible use of data, attention to bias and fairness, and the ability to communicate results clearly Coursework is hands-on, using R as the primary language, with selective use of Python (e.g., Colab) for deep learning and LLM.