ProfessorTim Marchand

Students at ISS work hard to improve their English skills to enable them to study abroad successfully and take advanced content classes in English. As regards the latter, let me introduce my elective courses which allow you to demonstrate your improved English proficiency, and also extend it by studying interesting content qualitatively (Area Studies) or quantitatively (CLIL Seminar on Data Science and Text Analysis).

The Area Studies course takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the peoples, history, society, and culture of a designated region through the disciplines of economics, business, law, sociology, or political science. In this course, you will have the chance to conduct a deep analysis of an area of your own choosing from any social science perspective. For example, students in the past have researched Multiculturalism in Australia; Maritime Security among ASEAN nations; and the different degrees of Happiness in Denmark and Japan.

In my CLIL seminar courses, we cover the practical basics of data science and text analysis through the use of R, one of the most popular programming languages used by data scientists today. You can learn important aspects of handling data: importing, cleaning, visualisation and hypothesis testing - all skills useful in both business and academia. In the latter stages of the course, you can also develop an understanding of text as a data type, and discover what analysis of texts can reveal about trends in society. Successful completion of the course equips students with the skills to write their own scripts in R, and the confidence to present original findings of their own chosen data.