NOTE: Beginning Fall 2025, course content will be delivered as part of the newly-structured MEDS Career & Professional Development Workshop series, in collaboration with Bren’s Career Services Team.

Course description

Having a polished online presence is essential for showcasing your skills, projects, expertise, and (importantly) your personality. Learners, collaborators, and future employers alike will look to your public online profiles to glean information about you and your work. As data scientists, this often means that they’ll head to one of two places: GitHub and / or your personal website. This course is designed to help you both lay the foundation for creating and maintaining these profiles in an organized, informative, and visually-appealing way. Over the next several weeks, you will:

build and deploy your personal website using popular data science tools and frameworks
create your first (of many!) data science blog posts
learn about how best to communicate your work to different audiences
understand where and how to document your projects and code
and more!

When is this taught?

This content has taken a variety of forms since MEDS begain in 2021 – we initially taught website development using the {distill} package in R (see our original website develoment & blog workshops).

When Quarto burst onto the scene in 2022, we revamped this content and delivered lessons as separate, non-credit-bearing workshops:

In Fall 2024, we combined these workshops into a full 2-unit course, with an additional focus on GitHub as a professional portfolio. While this course was a lot of fun and seemed to work pretty well, conversations with Bren’s Career Services Team highlighted potential benefits of more consistent messaging and collaboration across all of the MEDS career and professional development teaching efforts. We’ll be offering this content as part of our new MEDS Career & Professional Develoment weekly workshop series beginning in Fall 2025.