saysbalakrishnan shankar associate dean of the school of engineering at amritapuri in kerala says students are looking to merge big data with biology and social science theories that you learn in big data or engineering can be applied to population of birds movement of sand dunes or census data he saysrao of sap says the ability to interpret and analyse data will soon become a base level expectation in all industries this is the reason why all undergraduate programmes in azim premji university have quantitative reasoning as a compulsory course the university also has two other compulsory courses for all one on public reasoning which trains students on the art of public discussion with respect for pluralism and the other on india its history sociology so that students can relate their core courses with the world outsidebehar says the success of the approach can be seen in the fact that the universitys undergraduate students are writing for peerreviewed academic journals like the economic political weekly epw it can also be seen in the confidence with which an undergraduate student in economics speaks about programming asked why she likes r over data analysis software like stata sahana says i like r because its open source it allows you way more control over what you do and allows more ways of thinking about a problemwith inputs from ranjani ayyar and shalina pillai