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Impact of Major on Career Path for 15600 Williams College Alums
- mcherm 14y agoThe data may be interesting to some people, but what intrigued me was the data visualization techniques. I thought the groupings were good, that the use of color and of line widths was helpful, and that the ways the lines curved actually HELPED to locate them (as compared with straight lines or a simpler curve). However, I think the left and right sides should have been represented by two different curves (perhaps the base of a parabola) that did NOT meet to make a full circle -- because until reading the details I didn't realize that the left and right sides of what appeared to be a single circle were essentially unrelated. All in all, a nice visualization.
- neovive 14y agoI agree that is was a very attractive visualization, but it took a couple minutes to see the significance of the left and right sides. It was very cool once it made sense.
- _delirium 14y agoThe article credits it, but fwiw, this is done via CIRCOS, an open-source piece of software specialized for visualizing things as these circular graphs: http://circos.ca/ http://circos.ca/
- im3w1l 14y agoHover over the small icons to see only that part. My main takeaway is that everyone does everything. Except biologists and chemists.
- ghaff 14y agoAt a school like Williams, Biology+Chemistry ~= pre-med. There's essentially no engineering. And most humanities degrees don't map to specific career paths.
- dewitt 14y agoNice data visualizations. One thing I'd also like to see here is a representation for multiple majors (35% of Williams students are double majors). Tangentially related, I was a little disappointed to see the slice for Computer Science is still so small. It was also small in mid-90's, and I believe it grew dramatically during the first dotcom boom, but it seems to have dropped back to the earlier levels. Not that I think the CS program should get any easier just to attract more students (it was notoriously difficult for a while), but rather I think that CS can be the perfect science complement in a well-rounded liberal arts education. Go Ephs.
- kryptonika 14y agoNice to see another Eph on HN :) I believe my year (2003) was the biggest CS class ever. Somewhere around 25-30; I forget the exact number.. I know it dipped in the couple years after that quite a bit, but not sure if it's picked up again.
- heliostatic 14y agoHa! You are dwarfed by the mighty Physics/Astro contingent. Except on HN, where you seem to outnumber us 2:1. edit: now 3:1
- arjunnarayan 14y ago2010 (my year) was about 7-10 I believe. And about half of those were double majors. Edit: 13 majors, of which at least 10 were double majors (including me and Dave below). Edit 2: Good grief. The whole lot on HN. Do any of us Ephs get any work done?
- davmre 14y agoWe actually had 13 CS majors in 2010: http://www.cs.williams.edu/people/alumni-directory/ http://www.cs.williams.edu/people/alumni-directory/. That went up to 20 majors in the class of 2011, so the gradient is positive!
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- kremdela 14y agoAs a graduate of (rival) Middlebury College, I am both impressed an un-surprised. Great visualization, but I'm not too surprised by the results. Accompanying percentages might make the results easier to digest. I would be interested to see similar correlations for more specialized schools (Caltech / MIT for instance) as a contrast to liberal arts education.
- whafro 14y agoAgreed. As a Bowdoin alum, this showed exactly what I'd expect from a great liberal arts college. But perhaps that's its value, for the parent concerned about their kid's choice of a "soft" major.
- zopf 14y agoWould be cool to also see majors displayed as equally-sized arcs in a separate viz, so that you could discern the relative percentages of each major that go into a given field.
- Pinckney 14y agoThis is a beautiful visualization, but it is very hard to parse, and I have no idea as to what problem it was designed to solve. With regards to this visualization in particular, it is hard to judge which majors are disproportionately represented in any individual field. There are in some places gaps in the spacing which make it appear as if a particular area is underrepresented; for instance, observe the apparent gap in Div I majors between Engineering and Health/Medicine. It is very hard to judge the relative distribution of fields for small majors, such as Geoscience. Path density seems exaggerated when the paths are drawn between nearby cells; compare the apparent density of paths between Div I <-> Arts/Writing/Social Science/Govt/etc with Div I <-> Education/Health. This seems to be because of the thinning of lines in the middle of the figure. In reading about this type of figure, I managed to find possibly the most incomprehensible infographic I've ever seen: http://circos.ca/intro/general_data/img/circos-car-purchase-legend.png http://circos.ca/intro/general_data/img/circos-car-purchase-...
- r00fus 14y agoIf you mouseover the specific visualizations on the righthand side, it will "filter" the main one and show only one major group.
- wilfra 14y agoThat isn't much better though. With very few exceptions, it looks like regardless of major people tend to enter various fields in very similar proportions. If the data were displayed in a table, I have a feeling the numbers would tell a much different story.
- sopooneo 14y agoI have a feeling that for the coming year or so, these visualizations will be overused in much the same way animated web site intros were in the late 90's. Because right now they are still new enough that the casual viewer will inevitably be impressed by their pretty colors, even if they do not particularly clarify any information. I suspect a slight backlash by late 2013, then a convergence towards legitimate use thereafter.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 14y agoI like how each bar has paths whose widths add up to the length of the bar (100%), but I don't like the circular approach to the visualization. It seems to imply that each arc on the circle is the same "type" as everything else, while in reality each subject of the agglomeration will have one major and one career (roughly speaking). Wouldn't it make more sense to divide it into two linear segments, whose sub-segments map to each other? That clarifies the distinction, and it'd make it clearer that, e.g., majors can't map to majors.
- ramanujan 14y agoLooks impressive, but a simple N x K contingency table would help understand the data better. Here, N=K=15 and entries of the table would be raw counts (e.g. number of major i in career j). You could color the cells by a few different criteria, e.g. absolute scaling, row normalization, and column normalization with red for "lots" and blue for "few". Maybe toggle those three criteria via a radio button. The advantage of such a visualization is that it allows you to see both trends (which rows/cols are more red, and which blue) and specific numbers. It is also immediately interpretable for a new viewer without any explanatory preamble. Sometimes the simple stuff is best.
- bicknergseng 14y agoI would say the advantage of the original visualization is the clear lines drawn between n and k. The table is very complex without filtering, but imo very clear when you mouse over the majors on the right. I would say the real problem is that the subsets are very uneven; the orange group dwarfs the other two, which arguably makes it more difficult to understand the trends. Along that line of thought, however, I would argue that the Psych majors belong with the green group.
- aetherson 14y agoAs a Williams alumnus: the major color groups correspond to the "divisions" of courses at Williams -- the administration groups all departments into three divisions, and requires that students take a certain number of classes from each division. So the chart faithfully reproduces the decision of the Williams College administration to include Psychology in Division II (Social Sciences) rather than Division III (math and hard sciences).
- juiceandjuice 14y agoThe categories are a little confusing. If you go into scientific research, say at a publicly funded institution, where does that put you? College Education? Technology? Engineering? Government? or just Other?
- jamesjporter 14y agoPresumably college education, as you often have a title like "professor", even though your actually day to day job is all about research.
- dxbydt 14y agointeresting, but probably suboptimal in a quantitative sense. As an immigrant, it is interesting how Law is a universal dumping ground in the US...whether you major in Arts or Econ or PolSci or English or Philosophy or Culture Studies....you end up in Law !! Why ? The clearest trends were Biology & Chemistry...almost always end up in Healthcare. Is "college education" a proxy for gradschool ? If so, nice to see some strokes ending up in that bucket even in these very difficult economic times.
- tatsuke95 14y ago>"whether you major in Arts or Econ or PolSci or English or Philosophy or Culture Studies....you end up in Law !!" Law school has been the "go to" graduate option for the "soft" sciences for a long time, since there is no requisite pre-law undergrad. It's also led to a surplus of Law graduates with no job prospects. >"Is "college education" a proxy for gradschool ?" I believe that is actually teaching college courses. But I could be wrong.
- geebee 14y agoI agree with you about law - this is a kind of "doubling down" on the "no math career path". However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school. I suspect that quite a few Williams students fit that description. MBAs are a harder option, because while they don't strictly require any one major, it can be harder to gain the experience MBA programs value with a very unmarketable major. This is a harsh but kind of funny dilbert... http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Journalism%20Major http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Journalism%20Major
- tatsuke95 14y ago>"However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school." Whole-heartedly agree. I'm an economics guy myself, so I didn't intend to denigrate the degree choice. Top students will succeed no matter what; but the law grad outlook (or lack of) is no joke. http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html?mg=reno64-wsj http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860...
- paulsutter 14y agoSo the vast majority of students - study majors that have little or nothing to do with their eventual work, and - end up in fields that were considered desirable by our grandfathers, but today are fodder for jokes?
- omni 14y agoWhich fields would those be?
- hayksaakian 14y agoPresumably English and such.
- elliott99 14y agoThere is an enormous pipeline of econ majors to consulting from lac's.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- arjn 14y agoPretty graph but how useful is it ? There is lots of data on it and it looks crowded and seems hard to interpret unless you use the right panel to filter down the data. Even then, no numbers mean that you only get a feeling of relative quantities. The interesting info for me is the "Division 1" graph showing large numbers of Arts/Literature people going into Technology/Engineering/medicine.
- andreipop 14y agoYou chose a great interface for display the data. I might add the numbers themselves, something I was curious about when browsing it.
- SonicSoul 14y agoif anyone is interested, this visualization is done with a d3 library by Mike Bostok http://bost.ocks.org/mike/uberdata/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/uberdata/ More visualization styles can be demoed here: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery In the original you can see the paths by hovering directly over the graph. i prefer this than having to hover the thumbnails on the side
- mhewett 14y agoMy god, a college that has a larger Math department than a CS department! What a wonderful place that must be.
- madcaptenor 14y agoHow are the majors grouped within each division, and how are the careers grouped? It looks like the careers and the majors are both grouped from least to most quantitative (see, for example, the fact that economics and psychology are towards the bottom of group 2). Is this done in some systematic way or just by eyeballing?
- rcthompson 14y agoEvery "ribbon" tapers to nothing in the middle, as if one were viewing a ribbon with a half-twist in it. Is this an intentional part of the visualization (to prevent the center from becoming overly crowded)?
- nandemo 14y agoIt's cool that they share this data, but that design reminds of the bad examples Edward Tufte includes in his The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.