Below is an embedded map of where all the English majors from 2000-2022 are currently. The darker the points appear, the more alumni that currently live there.
One area that surprised us was the bubble of people who gathered in Colorado. It made sense to us that people stayed around Minneapolis because of its proximity to Carleton. The coasts are also popular just in terms of job opportunities. Apart from Colorado, it seems like most graduates did not gather in other central states. This made us wonder why people chose Colorado.
The graph below shows the 8 most populated states by Carleton Alumni that were English majors from 2000-2022.
After doing some further exploration of the Carleton Alumni Directory, we started seeing two main patterns. The first is an important consideration– many English majors who graduated recently are pursuing further education. This might explain the flow to Colorado due to some of the good graduate programs at schools like CU Boulder. The second consideration would be that Carleton College advertises a liberal arts education, so many English graduates do not necessarily pursue a career directly related to their major.
This second consideration makes our analysis slightly different because the patterns we find can not be interpreted as the best job sites for English-specific careers, since we can not guarantee that is why Carleton graduates are moving there.
Overall, this data opens the table up for further exploration into why these patterns exist if not for direct job opportunities. Similarly, maybe this visualization will inspire researchers in other fields to see the data in a new way that could spark new ideas.
