  While coursework provides undergraduate data science students with some
relevant analytic skills, many are not given the rich experiences with data and
computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students
often have limited exposure to team-based data science and the principles and
tools of collaboration that are encountered outside of school. In this paper,
we describe the DSC-WAV program, an NSF-funded data science workforce
development project in which teams of undergraduate sophomores and juniors work
with a local non-profit organization on a data-focused problem. To help
students develop a sense of agency and improve confidence in their technical
and non-technical data science skills, the project promoted a team-based
approach to data science, adopting several processes and tools intended to
facilitate this collaboration. Evidence from the project evaluation, including
participant survey and interview data, is presented to document the degree to
which the project was successful in engaging students in team-based data
science, and how the project changed the students' perceptions of their
technical and non-technical skills. We also examine opportunities for
improvement and offer insight to other data science educators who may want to
implement a similar team-based approach to data science projects at their own
institutions.
