Final Project Pitch

Member + Definition:

This week we met with groups and discussed our final project ideas and our group, consisting of Adam Mahabir, Kyra Landry, Daniel Estrada, Rowen Hinrichs and Cuong Chi Tran, has decided that we want to make a visual timeline of the most popular majors at Carleton. 

Sources:

The registrar’s office has lots of data about popular majors, and we have contacted them and are waiting for them to get back to us with the data. We hope to have at least ten years of data, and we hope to show trends across time in a visual way that is easy to understand and engaging for everybody.

Processes:

We plan to use data visualization tools such as Voyant in order to compile the gathered data into more intuitive forms, such as line graphs or Beeswarm Plot. Further consideration would be undertaken as we go over our data.

Presentation:

What we would hope to do is create a video that shows a changing graph with all the most popular majors through the years.

Proposed Timeline:

End of Week 8:

The first step would be to collect the raw data, for this we will collect data from the school creating a count of different majors over time.

End of Week 9:

Then we will process this data and create visualizations of the most popular majors over time

End of Week 10:

We would put on the finishing touches to make it more presentable.

End of Exams:

Presentation of our result.

Inspirations:

Significant Trends, National Statistics

Brief Messages:

Kyra –  I think this project will be a nice callback to our unit about data visualization, and I’m pretty excited to apply these skills to this topic because it’s quite interesting. I’m very interested in what the results will have in store.

Daniel – I am interested in seeing the popular majors overtime to see if there is a pattern in majors as time passes. For example, has there been an increase in STEM majors as our economy has changed? Is there any increase in majors depending on the current state of the US? Overall, I just think it would be interesting to see how class years differed in majors.

Cuong – Seeing as how Carleton is a Liberal Arts College, I believe there should be a great diversity of the chosen majors. On the other hand, it’s possible that those liberal arts courses are for supplementing a more popular major from a global perspective, so it’s possible that the result will lean heavily to certain majors, such as nowadays’ Computer Science Major.

Adam Mahabir – I think this project will be interesting to see how the most popular majors change over time. This could be also compared to most popular majors across the uU.S. to see if it matches those or if it differs. 

Rowen – The needs and wants of the world change with time, so the wants and needs of college students entering that world will change as well.  With the emergence of new technologies, as well as how much Carleton emphasizes “shopping” for your major, the popularity of majors is bound to fluctuate. This project will give us an interesting look into how the majors at Carleton have changed over time.