Visualization Research Project, First Year Seminar: Everything is a Network
Authors: Antwyan Reynolds & Mark Herron
Research Question. For our visualization, we decided to just focus on math majors. We both have a desire to become mathematics/economics majors in the near future, so we wanted to see how the job world has evolved for Wooster math graduates, specifically, over three decades. This made us wonder: has the math job field expanded and increased overtime, and if so, how?
Hypothesis. We hypothesized that the range of jobs will expand as time progresses and people will expand into more fields. With more technology and a larger population, the amount of job options will have increased across decades. In contrast, we also hypothesize that more people will fall into education and teaching professions, simply because teachers will always be needed.
Approach. The way we approached our data is by showing all the occupations that Wooster alumni with math majors pursued. Then, we sorted the occupations into three decades: 1984-1994, 1995-2003, and 2004-2014. Each decade was given a unique shape and color. We quantified the number of people who pursued each type of career. Then, we sorted the jobs by which decade had the most and the least alumni within it. If a job has the same shape as a decade, then that decade represents the most alumni in that line of work. If it has the same color as a decade, then it contained the least number of workers from that decade.
Findings. What we found out with our data is that the two careers math majors pursued the most over the decades were management occupations and teaching jobs. In the computer and mathematics careers, there was a large increase from 2004-2014, most likely because of more widespread use of technology. There were lots of teachers for every decade. Few careers, such as healthcare, life physical science, social science, and office administrator had very few math majors, and sometimes none at all. In decade three there was more students in the math majors.
Conclusion. As predicted, the number of jobs for math majors expanded over time, going from about 5 fields from 1984-1994 to well over 10 fields from 2004-2014. Math majors started to infiltrate a lot more jobs fields than 20 years ago. Also, educational professions were clearly seen through all 3 decades, showing that teaching was a consistent work field throughout all decades. I feel like in the future, math majors will slowly decline from the workforce do to the increase in technology. STEM majors will start to take over the working world. Math majors have expanded job fields as time went on, but in the near future, they will need to have a strong STEM field to keep this trend alive.