The Data Science Minor does not allow more than 10 credits to overlap between your major and minor. The Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS) does not automatically compare reports for both a major and minor. This means that the data science minor degree audit may include courses that are not allowed for your minor if there is too much overlap with other requirements. Advisers for the Data science minor manually review each student’s audits in the quarter that they are graduating. However, this is also something you can do on your own. Follow these instructions to check your own overlap restriction so you are not surprised by last-minute courses.

Courses that are considered for the overlap restriction are any courses that are required by your major. Most often this can be determined by looking at departmental requirements in a degree audit (DARS report) for your major. Some majors require students to take specific courses for their general education requirements. These courses also count toward the overlap restriction. See below to determine whether this applies to you or not. Note that there is no restriction on the amount of overlap among other minors.

How to compare DARS Departmental Requirements

1. Open MyPlan to run a degree audit (DARS report) for your major. Read instructions for how to run and read a degree audit. 
2. Open a separate tab. Run another degree audit for your data science minor. 
3. Find the section of your major degree audit titled, Departmental Requirements. Some majors title this section differently, but it should be the section that includes required courses for your major. 
4. In your minor degree audit, compare each course to the courses that fall under Departmental Requirements or Admissions Requirements in your major degree audit. 
   1. Every course that falls under Departmental Requirements will be considered for the overlap restriction. 
   2. Courses that are categorized as Admissions Requirements are also considered for the overlap restriction.
   3. We do not count courses that fall under General Education, University Requirements, or General Electives. These are not considered for the overlap restriction.
      1. If your major requires you to choose from a specific set of courses for your general education (e.g. HCDE), these courses are considered for the overlap restriction. See the General Education section below these instructions if you are unsure if this applies to you.  
5. In your minor degree audit, you may see courses listed at the bottom under the statement, “A different course was used where the following could have applied.” These courses do not count toward your minor. 
   1. These courses may exceed the 10 allowable credits of lower division coursework or the 4 allowable courses from one minor course list (data studies, data skills, cross-cutting). 
6. If there are more than 10 credits that count for both your minor and major requirements, you have too much overlap. You are only allowed 10 credits of overlap.
   1. If you have a double major, 10 credits from each major can count toward your minor.
7. Contact us (dataminor@uw.edu) if…  
   1. If you would like us to rearrange your degree audit to include courses falling under “A different course was used where the following could have applied.”
   2. You have too much overlap. We can manually remove a course from your degree audit to correctly reflect the courses that count for your minor and the credits you have remaining. This helps prevent any delay in graduation.
   3. You are having trouble determining which courses count as overlap between your major and minor. 

How to determine whether your major requires specific general education courses

Most majors allow students to choose any General Education courses to take. For example, students may be able to choose any 20 credits of Social Sciences coursework to complete the Social Sciences Area of Inquiry. Some majors may specify which courses students must choose from for the General Education requirement. For example, students must take 20 credits of Social Science coursework, but 10 of the credits must be x course and y course or must be selected from a previously approved list. This means these courses are specific to your major, and will be considered for the Data Science Minor overlap restriction.  

If your major’s degree audit is unclear, you can compare it with your major’s website. In this example from HCDE, students must choose Natural Science Area of Inquiry courses from an HCDE-specific list. These courses would be considered for the overlap restriction because they are specific to the major.

 

Data Science Minor

Leverage familiarity with data science in fields outside of data science, and gain skills and fluency to work with data in your major domain of study.

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