Systems Design Engineering is a broad and multi-disciplinary field, and students in our co-op program have the opportunity to work in a great range of industries, locations, and job settings. It's well known that salary values differ across all of these dimensions, so how does salary vary within such a broad program?
This was the question I set out to answer. Unfortunately, detailed information about students' co-op salaries, jobs, and demographics are hard to get. So I asked my class to voluntarily offer this information in a class-wide spreadsheet. I helped students understand the value of having the spreadsheet as a resource for networking and helping each other with the co-op process. Furthermore, the salary data was anonymized to protect the students.
Once I had collected a decent amount of data, I began cleaning the data set and running statistics. Despite the small sample size and few attributes, there were some significant findings.
I wanted to be able to present the information in a way that would captivate users: visually, and by telling a story. On my whiteboard, I started experimenting with what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Knowing that I wasn't able to find enough insights to tell a story within the data, I instead decided to tell the story of the project itself.
Once I had finalized the story I wanted to tell and had a rough idea of the layout, I headed to the computer to create the graphic. Typically I'd use Photoshop or Illustrator, but I decided to take the opportunity to experiment with a new tool, and chose to work in GIMP.
After many hours and many more guidelines, I had my finished product. The viewes flows through the graphic as they follow the story of collecting, analyzing, and summarizing the data.
Creating this infographic was an exciting experience for me. It was my first introduction to data collection and analysis, from which I hope to have many more. I'm looking forward to working with larger and richer data sets, finding interesting stories, and presenting them in in a beautiful manner.
