Comparing the Exploration of Academic Majors at Duke

Project Summary

Over ten weeks, Math/CompSci majors Benjamin Chesnut and Frederick Xu joined forces with International Comparative Studies major Katharyn Loweth to understand the myriad academic pathways traveled by undergraduate students at Duke. They focused on data from Mathematics and the Duke Global Health Institute, and worked closely with departmental leadership from both areas.

Themes and Categories
Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Data+
Year
2017
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu

Project Results: The team created interactive Tableau visualizations of academic and demographic data within Mathematics and Global Health. Working in MySQL, Python, and R, they clustered students into different groups based on math courses taken. They also performed feature selection to understand the key differences between Global Health majors and minors, as well as analyzing the main pathways into the Global Health program.

Partially sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and by the Duke Global Health Institute.

Click here for the Executive Summary

Faculty Leads: Jonathan Mattingly, David Toole

Project Manager: Zhennan Zhou

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