Building a Data Science Program Through Hackathons and Informal Training in Puerto Rico

With the growth of data in a plethora of fields ranging from agriculture to medicine to finance, data science is quickly becoming one of the most in demand professional careers of the decade. However, only a handful of minority serving institutions in the US have a course much less a formal program or certification track in data science. This paper highlights a solution at a public minority serving institution, which is in a hiring freeze, to create an interdisciplinary data science program using local resources through both formal and informal training and hackathons in collaboration with top research institutions and industry leaders locally and abroad in data science.