EXPLORING THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA STUDENT POPULATION THROUGH DATA VISUALIZATION

Abstract

What makes some students change their majors often, while other students choose a major and stick with it for the entirety of their college life? In order to answer this question, we created a number of interactive data visualizations using data provided by the University of Arizona’s office of analytics and institutional research. The programs we wrote allow users to explore the academic careers of the student population at the University of Arizona. Data visualizations are visual representations of a dataset, instead of presenting the user with lists of numbers, visualizations attempt to create renditions of the data that are richer and easier to read. The interactive features we implemented let users filter the dataset, “zooming in” on specific aspects of interest such as demographic features of the dataset. We used the d3.js library to build these visualizations. In this document, we discuss some of the design choices, their consequences, and show some of the findings from this dataset.