At Iowa State University, we’ll help you turn your passion for technology and innovation into career possibilities. You’ll take a career development class called Professional Career Preparation (LAS 2030) to help you launch your career. Our LAS Career Services team can help guide your professional development with personalized career advising, practical strategies for job and internships, and more.

Internship opportunities

Data science majors regularly intern at companies in and around Ames, including Collins Aerospace, Principal Financial, Nationwide, John Deere, Kingland, and Workiva as well as large tech companies such as Microsoft or Google. Iowa State also hosts some of the largest career fairs in the nation, giving you opportunities to connect with a wide range of employers.

As you gain hands-on experience, you’ll build skills, knowledge, and confidence for innovative careers in fields such as software development, data analysis and science, technology consulting, finance, or academia.

You’ll gain additional hands-on skills through the data science major’s required capstone project. You will select your own project topic, collect and organize publicly available data, develop a dashboard, and incorporate predictive or statistical modeling. Project topics are varied and can address local, state, or national issues. Some past topics include predicting wildfires, analyzing U.S. domestic flight trends, developing an interactive dashboard for Formula 1 data analysis, and forecasting Iowa State meal plans.