Opportunities in Digital Agriculture 

As data continues to become more important throughout all aspects of society, skills in digital agriculture and data science are becoming “must haves” for the next generation workforce in the agriculture, food, life and natural resource sciences. 

As an undergraduate in the College of Agriculture, you can find multiple opportunities to gain knowledge and skills in the area of data science and digital agriculture, including data-focused courses within all 11 of our academic departments. 

Learn to manage data, use statistics, or build skills in programming, databases and GIS. Verify your decisions with facts and metrics, and explain your work using data visualization and storytelling.

A combination of knowledge within your major and skills in data science is exactly what companies are looking for when interviewing our students for internships and full-time positions.

You are a student in the digital age. You know learning how to understand and communicate data is a smart idea. Let the College of Agriculture help prepare you for a data-driven future!

Talk to your advisor about including data science in your degree plan.

Data Science/Digital Agriculture Courses

While the fundamentals are the same across disciplines, the way data is collected and used can be different. Each of our 11 academic departments offer data-focused courses and most of the majors align well with the additional certifications identified below. Talk with your advisor about what courses might fit best in your plan of study.

Data-Driven Agriculture Minor 

Pursuing the Data Driven Agriculture Minor allows you to gain valuable skillsets to leverage the complex data sources that are becoming increasingly important in all aspects of the agriculture industry from production through processing to marketing and decision-making.

This minor will help you understand the entire data pipeline from data origination, computations, analytics, visualization, to informed decision making and automation. You will gain valuable experience with organizing and managing data. There are 21 credits required, but many of these may overlap or fit within your major field of study.

Data-Driven Agriculture Minor in the Purdue Catalog

Certificate in Applications of Data Science 

This Purdue certificate is designed to prepare graduates to develop and apply techniques and tools to extract knowledge from complex data.

It requires 16 credits of targeted coursework, but many of these may overlap or fit within your major field of study. You will learn statistics, computation, data management and analytics, and data ethics. The final 6 credits toward the certificate are applications which will tie to your major field of study related to data visualization and data-driven decision making. With some planning and coordination from your advisor, many College of Agriculture students are able to obtain this certificate without any additional credits.

Certificate in Applications of Data Science in the Purdue Catalog

Learning Communities

Part of Purdue’s Integrative Data Science Initiative which is designed to train students in data literacy, the Data Mine Learning Community is a research-based community created to introduce students to data science concepts and equip them to create solutions to real-world problems. 

 

The Agriculture Technology and Innovation Learning Community covers topics of technologies related to environmental protection, plant and livestock production systems, agricultural machinery, and more. Through tours and extracurricular activities, you will get a broad-spectrum view of tech in ag and meet many faculty and staff across the college. With a little historical perspective but mostly a forward-looking focus, we will introduce you to some innovation opportunities on campus and hopefully spark your inventiveness toward pursuit of new solutions.