The main goal of the computer science Data Science degree is to provide the theoretical and practical background for someone to become a data engineer. Graduates of the program typically begin their careers working as part of a team that is responsible for some large, existing system, maintaining the code, and making extensions to it.

The data science program provides students with the knowledge and skills needed to become a data scientist. The typical job entry-level data scientist works as part of a team to build models from data that can be used to understand a phenomenon, and potentially take advantage of this understanding in various ways. You should choose your program based on which career you are most interested in pursuing a software engineer or a data scientist.

You might want to consider a double major if.

You are interested in computer science, but would like to go more in depth into areas such as working with massive data sets, statistical analysis of data, or machine learning You are interested in data science, and have a strong interest in the under the hood details such as systems aspects and writing/analyzing software You are unsure whether you want to start your career as a software engineer or a data scientist

However, please note that you will unless you take a lot more courses, you will have less knowledge/skills than someone majoring in just one or the other. Instead of a double major, another path to consider would be to obtain a B.S. in either computer science or data science, and then get an M.S. in the other.

A data science course is like a guide that teaches you how to handle and make sense of data. It's a set of lessons or classes that teach you the skills and tools needed to collect, analyze, and draw useful insights from different kinds of information.

Think of it as a roadmap that helps you understand how to use data to solve problems or make decisions. An ideal data science course should cover industry-required topics and be updated regularly. Hence, besides programming languages, it should equip the learner with the soft skills required by a data science aspirant.