I wanted to reply to this post as what dontoverfit says in his comment is in many aspects false and a quite damaging. I am a current MIDS student so I am not partial about the program, but it does not seem dontoverfit is partial either.
The program did go through a lot of turmoil in the leadership team during the past year, with the director leaving. I don't know of any teachers that quit, but some courses changed for the next year, given reviews by students. I believe that was for the best and while it was a bit too much, it is still a new program. Since then the program has stabilized a lot, there haven't been any major changes for over a year and I don't expect the program to change much anymore.
The program has 'specialized' data science courses. It is a data science program after all so I would expect to see this. It is the same for NYU's or Columbia's Data Science programs. I would not say they are as basic as the users above said, as in bootcamp level, but here are a few of the core courses in MIDS for you to check yourself:
1. Machine Learning: https://kylebradbury.github.io/ids705_sp2020/syllabus.html
2. Statistical Modeling: https://ids-702-f20.github.io/Course-Website/
3. Practical Data Science: https://www.practicaldatascience.org/html/index.html This is an intro to programming course similar to 523L in the core Statistics MS at Duke.
The second year of the program has 6 electives of your choice, so you actually get to choose 50% of the classes you will take across departments. I personally have chosen electives in the Mathematics, Computer Science, ECE and Statistics departments and I have not experienced any problems getting access into them. During Add-Drop period I added and dropped tons of subjects and I never had a single professor tell me I was not allowed to take their subject. I don't know of anyone at MIDS that had any issues taking the course of their choice either as long as courses were not closed to students of all other department and as long as students met prerequisites (although, even then, in most cases professors are open to waive those requirements). In fact some MIDS students have gone off to do unusual electives like Real Analysis or Topology.
The program places really well on both Internship and Full-Time opportunities. In fact it places much better than other programs like the Statistics MS. The first cohort secured offers as data scientists or similar in Facebook (2 or 3 students), Google, McKinsey, Bain, Uber, Blackrock... and it was a relatively small cohort of 36 people. I know firsthand this year won't be much different, most people have already secured really good positions despite covid. And no, it is not only the students that had strong backgrounds before coming to the program. You can see for yourself in Linkedin.
The program does not have issues receiving applicants. This year they received around 960 applications, for which they plan to extend 30 offers ( with a yield of 50%, that means 15 students), partly because of deferrals from the past year, but also because they really want to keep class sizes small. Acceptance rates are quite similar to what you see on other top Masters at Duke, hovering around 10%.
Also, I don't know anything about professors not wanting to teach at MIDS or about the statistics department not wanting anything to do with MIDS. As far as I am concerned, this is actually false with professors in the Statistics department reserving seats for MIDS students in subjects like Bayesian Statistics.
