
Impact of Major on Career Path for 15600 Williams College Alums - kafkaesque
http://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/devadoss/careerpath.html
======
Pinckney
This 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-...](http://circos.ca/intro/general_data/img/circos-car-purchase-
legend.png)

~~~
sopooneo
I 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.

~~~
chrisamiller
They're already overused in genome biology. They do a beautiful job of
representing interchromosomal rearrangements in cancer, but don't actually
convey a whole lot of information.

~~~
jamesjporter
Yes! I hate when people have a figure of some crazy bioinformatics they did
that doesn't actually convey any information to me as a reader.

------
ramanujan
Looks 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
I 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
As 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).

------
dewitt
Nice 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
Nice 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.

~~~
arjunnarayan
2010 (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
We actually had 13 CS majors in 2010:
<http://www.cs.williams.edu/people/alumni-directory/>. That went up to 20
majors in the class of 2011, so the gradient is positive!

~~~
ssrubin
Woo 2011 Williams CS. Ok, that's my one comment on HN for the year.

~~~
dewitt
Don't forget to send me your resumes, everyone: dewitt@google.com. : )

~~~
nmh
dammit Dewitt - stop stealing all the good ones with your fancy Google.com
address...

------
scarmig
I 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.

------
paulsutter
So 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
Which fields would those be?

~~~
hayksaakian
Presumably English and such.

~~~
elliott99
There is an enormous pipeline of econ majors to consulting from lac's.

------
mcherm
The 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.

~~~
_delirium
The 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/>

------
im3w1l
Hover over the small icons to see only that part.

My main takeaway is that everyone does everything. Except biologists and
chemists.

~~~
ghaff
At a school like Williams, Biology+Chemistry ~= pre-med. There's essentially
no engineering. And most humanities degrees don't map to specific career
paths.

------
dxbydt
interesting, 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
> _"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
I 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>

~~~
tatsuke95
> _"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/SB1000142405270230445860...](http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304458604577486623469958142.html?mg=reno64-wsj)

------
kremdela
As 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
Agreed. 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.

------
mhewett
My god, a college that has a larger Math department than a CS department! What
a wonderful place that must be.

------
SonicSoul
if anyone is interested, this visualization is done with a _d3_ library by
Mike Bostok <http://bost.ocks.org/mike/uberdata/>

More visualization styles can be demoed here:
<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

------
arjn
Pretty 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.

------
madcaptenor
How 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?

------
juiceandjuice
The 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
Presumably college education, as you often have a title like "professor", even
though your actually day to day job is all about research.

------
rcthompson
Every "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)?

------
zopf
Would 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.

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nandemo
It'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_.

------
andreipop
You chose a great interface for display the data. I might add the numbers
themselves, something I was curious about when browsing it.

