Final Project Pitch: An Alumni Visualization

Members: Maya, Doug, Chris, Ty, Hermela

Topic & Objectives: We want to examine the patterns of alumni in terms of their major at Carleton and how that correlates with current occupation and where they live now. We want to produce a visualization of the data we would find so that the trends we discover will be clearer to understand and further research/analysis might be inspired. 

Proposed Methodology: 

• Sources: Data from the Carleton alumni directory– aim to just start with a single major. We can either find a usable csv file, or we can web scrape the data
• Processes: Transform data from directory in a google sheet/excel; will need to standardize the results to some degree (i.e. determine whether we need a math/stats major along with a “math” and “stats” major as math/stats used to be grouped as the same major). Depending on if we want to list only the most recent occupation of each alumni or all of an alumni’s occupations, we would have to remove unnecessary occupations.
• Presentation: using graphs/other data viz tools; maybe add a time component to see if the data changes over time. Some visualization tools to consider include Tableau, PowerBI, etc. Depending on what exactly we want to display, there are some different ways to present our data. If we want to display where alumni now reside, we could plot them as pins on a map, with popups on their pins describing their occupation, name, graduation year, etc. If we wanted to focus solely on their occupations, we can display the number of alumni in each occupation field, which ones are in leadership positions (presidents, managers, CEOs, etc.), which ones are business owners, etc. 

Proposed Timeline

• 2/16: Submitted Proposal
• 2/21: Made significant progress on the collection of data
• 2/23: Beginnings of a visualization rough draft
• 2/25: Nearing completion of initial visualization draft
• 2/28: Complete visualization draft
• 3/1: Polish/Clean/Perfect visualization
• 3/3: Prepare Presentation
• 3/5 : Practice presentation

Similar DH Projects:

• http://1023.io/mapping-alumni

Chris’s Personal Interests and Hopes for this Project:

I’m personally very interested in this project because it requires me to utilize and improve the skills necessary for my future career in data analytics. Specifically, becoming better at data visualization and learning new visualization tools/software are skills that I’ll need in a career where I have to present my statistical analyses and findings. Plus, by potentially learning Tableau, PowerBI, or any other tool, I could add it to my resume and help with internships or jobs. I’ve always been passionate about data visualization and I feel like it’s a skill that isn’t emphasized enough at Carleton, with very few classes touching upon the skill, so having the opportunity to create my own visualization in this class is very exciting to me. Plus, I’ve always wanted to find some way to improve Carleton’s alumni directory. Though this project will likely contain one or few majors, it could serve as a draft or stepping stone to a more interactive and visual alumni directory for Carleton. 

Maya’s Personal Interests and Hopes for this Project: 

I think this project will be a great opportunity to apply a lot of the skills we have learned so far, but with the added excitement of getting to choose our own data set. This feels like it adds an additional aspect of creative freedom that I am looking forward to seeing in our data analysis and visualization. I have also just found the idea of a visualized alumni directory really interesting, so I am excited to finally see something like that– and it’s even better that I get to help make it happen. This project will hopefully give me more confidence in my ability to work with the tools we have learned about and I hope to be able to apply them to data I might collect in the future. 

Doug’s Personal Interests and Hope for this Project:

I am looking forward to this project because I think the best way to learn is to venture off on your own project. We have learned lots of different skills and methods about visualization and mapping that will certainly help in this project. As someone who is studying computer science and hopes to be working with a lot of data, I think being able to do these projects will help me learn how to communicate data to others in an efficient and effective way. 

Ty’s Personal Interests and Hope for this Project:

I believe that this is going to be an awesome opportunity to showcase the skills we have learned so far in class. I’m hoping to use what I’ve learned in this class and others about data visualization to hopefully make a fantastic final project. I’m hoping this project will be something I can be proud of in the future and useful for a potential future in data science or data analytics. I’m also excited to venture off on our own with my group and do our own project.