Creators: Thomas Gross, Su Zheng, and Daniel Margolis
Course: Information Presentation and Visualization (Borkin)
Abstract: The Massachusetts Promise Fellowship (“MPF”) is an organization at Northeastern University created with the goal of training future leaders by giving a group of young people the resources, support, and knowledge through an opportunity to do service work for their community. This program places fellows at school programming for middle school and high school students, focusing on mentoring, academic enrichment, and college/career exploration. Our dataset comes directly from MPF, in the form of their alumni survey. The first part of the survey featured simple demographic information, with questions asking about where the alumni live, where they work, and their education. The second part of the survey was more open-ended, with questions asking about their overarching experiences with MPF, including how they would want to be involved with MPF in the future. These questions are just as useful as the demographic ones, if not more useful, as they give insight into the opinions of the alumni and how the program could be improved. There are 45 columns in the dataset, two of which were made by our team. There are 164 total responses. Since the responses originated from Google Forms, all data are textual and majority are categorical. There are no quantitative columns in the set. As mentioned previously, questions range from demographic in nature to the use of Likert-Scale-type questions to more open ended questions. The survey was sent out to individuals with the likert-scale-type questions used to measure the degree and intensity of Alums’ attitudes and opinions towards their experience. They’re tied together by the similarity of being information gathered directly from MPF Alums. In this project specifically, we are investigating the Alums’ experience in the MPF organization. Our goal is to accurately depict what the experience was like for individuals in the program by determining common trends from survey responses. Our project consisted of understanding the information, preparing and cleaning the data, and then analyzing the data through Tableau, a data visualization tool. After cleaning our data and subsequently analyzing our new, more polished data set, we set out to answer the question of what the Alumni of MPF are doing now. With our new flattened “Industry” insight that bucketed where the Alumni currently work, we were able to better understand what broad fields the survey respondents entered after their work at MPF. When looking at this data, it is clear that Alumni had a strong pooling around the education and the youth or community and human services sectors. This showcases the clear impact that MPF service has on potential career paths of alumni. We also sought to see if there was a correlation between MPF service and whether the individual sought a career in non-profit or profit business. In our exploration, it is clear that there was no correlation with alumni falling into both categories almost dead evenly. We also used a brushing and linking technique to link the survey respondents to how they felt about certain questions in the survey to better understand the relationship between profession progression and the selected survey question.