Impact of Major on Career Path for 15600 Williams College Alums

If you mouseover the specific visualizations on the righthand side, it will "filter" the main one and show only one major group.

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.

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.

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.

It says it does represent double majors, but probably not in any useful capacity that you were looking for: "Those with double-majors have two arcs on the left (one from each of their majors, each arc of 1/2 thickness) that combine into one resulting career choice."

At Bard College, we have recently begun offering CS intro courses that are juxtaposed with other disciplines. For instance, one of the most popular courses this semester was a CS called "Interactive Media" that had students learning Processing with the end result being they had to create a substantial piece of art (installation / visualizer / game) at the end of it. I also believe that next semester there is an intro course that is focused on using NLP (really basic stuff like N-grams, counting the number of word repetitions on a text) in conjunction with experimental poetry.

Its great because it gets the fundamentals of programming down while also allowing the students to attach it to their other interests. I love being able to talk to my art student friends about their projects and helping them with code. They are all really into it.

Hi Dewitt,

I think I know who you were and met you at Williams. I'm also a CS major and I graduated in the late 90's. It is indeed the case that the CS major grew absurdly huge in the late 90's, with my class being double the size of the previous year's class, and the class below me doubling in the size of my class. And with intro courses being yet more absurd. All of my memories of our profs involve them with big circles under their eyes, clutching mugs of coffee.

Which fields would those be?

I agree that is was a very attractive visualization, but it took a couple minutes to see the significance of the left and right sides. It was very cool once it made sense.

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/

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.

>"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.

Williams is a (highly ranked) private liberal arts school[1]. That alone will significantly bias the results of this data. I'm sure a good chunk of those people chose Williams just so they could have a prestigious school to get their undergrad degree from for their application into law school.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_College

Williams College's primary student body composition is affluent upper middle class white persons. It is #1 on the US News & World Report and has a fairly high number of cross admits with Harvard/Yale. So everyone is high achieving/extremely driven. The primary differentiator is that it disproportionately attracts students who are very much sold on the "study a broad liberal arts education for the sake of education and forsake career oriented life skills". I.E. the attitude that gets mocked daily on reddit. I.E. the sort of idealism that led Paul Graham to study Philosophy in college (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html) is omnipresent on campus. Almost everyone starts an idealist.

This continues at Williams for a few years, until people panic and realize they don't have too many bankable life skills to get a real job. However, everyone is, or is surrounded by affluent, successful, career-oriented people. So they look around to find one of those successful career paths that are still open to them. Unless they are majoring in math/sciences (Williams has a 10% math major population, which is very high compared to the US average), or have already begun the pre-med track, the only clear avenues that aren't blocked off by their past decisions are consulting->MBA, and law school.

Disclosure: I attended Williams. About 25% of students double major. I started off with a clear "1 major for me, 1 for life skills" path, and intended to major in CS and Music. At the end of freshman year I realized I was an exceedingly mediocre composer, and switched my second to Economics (if that seems like a cynical career move, at the time I thought economics was the path to becoming Hari Seldon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asi...)

I went to a science/technology magnet high school, and 10 years out more of my classmates are in one of: law, consulting, or finance than any other. Even people who did a BS and sometimes MS often ended up getting graduate degrees and going into consulting. Why? The real money in this country isn't in making things, but in managing the people who make things, or in providing professional services to the managers. Silicon Valley is an exception right now, but only because consultants have yet to figure out how to drive down engineering salaries by outsourcing social network development to India (although Google, Microsoft, etc, have tried ardently to keep salaries down by engaging in anti-competive practices like agreeing not to poach each others' engineers).

Heck, even the Valley isn't immune to this phenomenon. Taking your CS degree to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan then lateraling to a VC fund after a few years is probably, adjusted for risk, the highest return career path in the Valley.

Economists end up in law all of the time because economics and law are so tightly knit, particularly antitrust/competition policy.

In my undergraduate thesis I looked at what causes schools to graduate more or less economics majors, and the most important factor is the existence of a business school at the university. If a school does not have a business school, like at a lot of top ranked liberal arts schools, students flock to the economics major.

As a former economics PhD student, I've seen first hand the breadth of fields that economists end up in. From professors in a law school, to FTC economists, to public policy and healthcare, economists will always end up in a diverse set of fields. That's the nature of economics -- it does not teach you a set of facts. Instead, it teaches you how to solve problems. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, every industry has problems that boil down to raw economics.

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.

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