Visualization Research Project, First Year Seminar: Everything is a Network
Authors: Heather Hartmann, Jack Redick & Zachary Cannon
Research Question. The United States of America is a vast country and the College of Wooster (COW) attracts students from almost every state, even international students. After graduating from COW, alumni can be found in almost every state working in many fields. Geography plays a role in job selection and availability. It is the reason people move 2,000 miles away to find a job in their desired career path. Alumni move all over after graduation because different regions have varying levels of accessibility for certain jobs. Thus we asked ourselves, does a desired career path determine what state an alumni moves to in order to find a career after graduating from The College of Wooster?
Hypothesis. We hypothesized that there are more alumni in STEM fields living on the West Coast of the United States and more alumni living on the East Coast in business related fields. Our group set out to prove that there were more alumni living on the West Coast in STEM careers. Our basis for this hypothesis draws from the observation that the West Coast, which has places like Silicon Valley, is considered the capital of the booming tech industry. The West Coast is often associated with technological advancements. The East Coast on the other hand is most often associated with business. This is mainly because New York City is home to the New York Stock Exchange where global transactions occur daily. For the federal reserve board, the chair of the New York Regional Reserve always has a vote in the committee that decides monetary policy because New York is looked at as being a leading force for the United States and for the global economy.
Approach. Our approach was to first classify jobs into what is considered a STEM related career and what is considered a business related career. Business careers that were shown are legal occupations, business and financial operations occupations, and sales and related occupations. The STEM related jobs are computer and mathematical, life, physical, and social science occupations, healthcare support occupations, architecture and engineering occupations, and healthcare practitioners and technical occupations. Then each of the states were sorted into their respective coasts, we then chose three representative states from each coast where a significant number of Wooster alumni actually work. The East Coast is Massachusetts (MA), Maryland (MD), and New York and New Jersey (NY/NJ) and the West Coast is California (CA), Oregon (OR), and Washington (WA). Based on the classifications stated above, the STEM and business jobs were then separated into each of the states and then each of the coasts. There are 76 alumni on the East Coast and 62 alumni on the West Coast. On the East Coast, 25 alumni hold STEM jobs and 51 alumni hold business jobs. On the West Coast, 27 alumni hold STEM jobs and 35 hold business jobs. There are 2 more alumni in STEM jobs on the West Coast then on the East Coast. Using Fisher’s exact test, the statistical significance for this data set is 0.22 with a p value of 0.05, indicating that the data is not statistically significant. However, Fisher’s exact test has some drawbacks with this data because of the small sample size and representative states chosen which have varying alumni living there. The small sample size lends itself better to taking a ratio of the STEM alumni and the total alumni on a certain coast. For the East Coast, the STEM ratio is 32.89%. For the West Coast, the STEM ratio is 43.55%. There is then a higher ratio of STEM alumni on the West Coast than the East Coast by 10.66%. Our group is trying to prove in our network that the West Coast has more alumni working in STEM jobs. Using the network, we tried to show this by weighting our links to show the number of alumni that had STEM or business jobs. The nodes were separated by putting the West Coast states on the left and the East Coast states on the right. On the first network, we abstracted all the states where the alumni are living, and jobs they have through weighted links that connect each state to either the business or STEM node. On the second network, we tried to show the connections between the states where the alumni live, and different job categories in either STEM or business.
Findings. Our group’s findings illustrate that first, this network has more alumni in business related occupations living on both coasts. Second, the ratio of graduates from the College of Wooster who have jobs in STEM and business fields on each coast showed a more accurate picture of the STEM and business divide. The usage of the ratio between these coasts is more accurate because of the small sample size that our group had to work with.This data illustrates that there are more business alumni than STEM alumni on both coasts (26 more on the East Coast and 8 more alumni on the West Coast). For the East Coast specifically, there are twice as many alumni in business related careers than there are alumni in STEM related careers. There may be more alumni in business on both coasts, but there is still a significant gap in the difference between STEM on these coasts. The West Coast overall has 2 more STEM alumni than the East Coast. The gap gets wider when the ratio between stem and overall alumni is taken. There is a 10.66% gap between these coasts. Fisher’s exact test showed no statistical significance; however, a better measure of the coasts is seen in this ratio.The ratio between the East and West Coast illustrates that the West Coast has not only more STEM alumni on this coast, but that STEM is one of the more prominent job categories on the West Coast. Moreover, it is difficult to use the network visualizations to distinguish the connection between the alumni and the jobs because there were minor differences in the amount of connections between the states and their jobs. New York had the most amount of connections to business, and California had the most to STEM. Also, there was not a lot of alumni that lived in Oregon or Washington that had STEM or business jobs.
Conclusion. From our network in cytoscape it is hard to tell that there is a large difference in the ratio of STEM to business jobs. However, once we mathematically analyzed our data we showed that there is over a 10% difference between these ratios. This suggests that there is a higher percentage of graduates working in STEM professions on the West Coast compared to the East Coast. The network itself shows that there are lots of Wooster graduates in business on both coasts, but the data supports our original hypothesis. However, this conclusion is not wholefully accurate. For example, our group utilized a small fraction of the alumni at Wooster on both coasts because this was the data that was classifiable and was available to us. Also, our group did not take into account that there maybe a small amount of alumni in total living on the West Coast. This data was not presented to us and could play a factor in our conclusion. Overall, although this was a small sample size, the data illustrates that Wooster alumni are moving toward states on the East and West Coasts that aline with their career choices. Through our network we showed there is a higher ratio of STEM to business jobs in the West Coast states in comparison to the ratio of the same jobs in the East Coast states. This conclusion could be furthered by looking at other college’s alumni and more alumni from Wooster to see if across the board, that alumni are moving toward Coasts that aline with their career choices.