Since my storyboard in Part 2, my audience more or less remains the same. I want to continue focusing on 2 segments that is students who want to pursue non technical degrees but are afraid to do so since they fear unemployement. My second segment would be parents who would see the different success strories portrayed in the article and would be more supportive of their childrens decision to pursue alternate careers. My intention behind posting comparision charts was also to show that there is not a lot of difference in the salaries earned in technical and non technical jobs and that students should be confident in their skillset as they can earn as much or in some cases even more than their technical peers. Initially, I also consiidered adding a segment of audience that focuses on technical employees who want to switch to more non technical careers but decided it might not be the right fit since people with more years of work experience would have different definitions of what a good salary is and the analysis currently does not conver all these caveats.
While finalizing my topic I wanted it to be personal and useful to students in general. So I spoke to a number of students at carnegie mellon and also some of my friends from my undergraduate college and a few students from my undergrad degree did not enjoy their engineering experience since they could not understand a lot of the topics covered and and no interest in the course material. They were however really talented in varied skillset that had nothing to do with engineering. This encoraged me to look into this topic even more in detail and see if the problem is prevalent across a lot of people or if my findings are based on a biased view.
In part 1 of my project I decided to set my premise by looking into popular courses taken by students in college and what the placement scenario looks like post graduation. If I see a common trend of more and more people getting into STEM degrees, I would want to understand the reason for the same. For this I would look into salary statistics as well as employement statistics. I do know from personal experience that non technical jobs are highly paid but I wanted to find potential high paying non technical roles as well. I also thought it would be interesting to show a state level comparision of salaries for technical and non technical roles. This would give people an insight into variation in salary as well as what states have good oportunities to pursue non technical careers. I also used Part 1 to identify potential data sources to make my further analysis easier.
In part 2 of my project, I built a shorthand storyboard showing the general flow of the story I want to convey. I also built out the charts from the data sources I identified in part 1. It was important to build my charts in this stage to understand if my data actually tells the story I want to convey. I also conducted interviews to get a better feedback on my storyboard. To decide on interview candidates, I wanted to understand my final story board better from a technical, data viz and layman perspective. So I interviewed one from each category. I interviewed a student pursuing a technical masters program at Carnegie Mellon university in order to understand his perspective on how the website renders to a user and if I can make any changes in terms of presenting my blog. I then asked a data visualization expert in order to garner her perspective on how I can improve my charts. Finally, I asked a friend who did not have any technical knowledge in order to understand if she would enjoy reading it as an outsider and if the topic is interesting enough
Based on the feedback I received, I added a navigation bar to my project to quickly navigate through the blog. I also changed my call of Action and gave very specific call of actions for both parents as well as students by telling then what the next steps are and what relavent links they could leverage to shape their career goals. I also changed the colour scheme for my dot chart to show a stark difference between non technical and technical roles. In case of charts that were not very intuitive regarding their interactivity for example the pie chart which gives more information on clicking on a slice, I specifically added a "Click to view more" message. I also added detailed information about each of the non technical founders and filled all pending placehorders with relavant articles