This page outlines academic advising for Master of Data Science students.
Who is part of the MDS Advising Team?
Maria DePastino, MDS Student Success Specialist, is the lead advisor for the MDS program.
Wes Lipschultz, Senior Director of Student and Academic Affairs in SCI, is the administrator responsible for supporting MDS advising.
Note: If emailing Wes and Maria, please continue to use online-mds-support@pitt.edu. Please see details below on additional means of engaging with MDS advising!
How does advising work for MDS?
MDS students have a few different ways to seek advising assistance:
- Students can consult directly with our resources below to learn basic information about prerequisites, what courses are offered when, and program policies.
- Students can email online-mds-support@pitt.edu with an advising question or request, and this email will be routed to Maria.
- Students can schedule an advising appointment by logging in to my.pitt.edu, searching for “Pathways,” and selecting the advising link. From there they will be able to browse available advising appointments and set up an online appointment from the dates and times available.
- Students can call the main SCI number – 412-383-4396 – and use the phone menu options to navigate to “advising” and then “MDS.”
How can an advisor help MDS students?
- We can help students review their planned pattern of scheduling. For students taking one class at a time, this is pretty simple and assistance may not be needed. However, given that not every course is offered every term, and some courses follow a staggered offering pattern, the more classes a student takes in a single term, the more likely they become bottlenecked by course offering patterns in later terms. Advisors can help students plan in advance for these issues.
- If students would like or need to avail themselves of University of Pittsburgh resources (the Counseling Center, Disability Resources and Services, the Career Center, etc.), the advising team may act as a guide to help students navigate these resources.
- If a student encounters barriers or academic difficulty, advisors can advocate for students and help them build strategies to address their challenges.
- In general, advisors can act as advocates to help a student navigate their options while they are a graduate student at Pitt.
What advising resources are available for MDS students?
MDS Course Carousel (what is offered when)
*Please use the menu options at the top, "navigate to term" and "filter by subject" to select the term you want and "CMPINF" for the courses to search. You should only look at the CMPINF courses available labeled as "MDS Coursera" in the "room" column - all other classes are not available to you.