Find My Career
The perfect place to find your calling
Contributors: Hritik Aggarwal, Jay Tanaka Grinols, Mark Lei
Problem and Solution Overview
One of the biggest responsibilities for adulting is for students to choose a suitable career path that can lead to financial stability and personal happiness. This important decision-making is done, most of the time, in one’s early years of college. Thus, college students who don’t know what they want to do after school, end up in a difficult situation as they choose their college coursework. Any student who makes a wrong choice of classes can either experience a setback in years of progress or land an unfruitful career. Thus, students don’t always get enough opportunities to explore their options and instead experience immense pressure in choosing the right classes that would fit their ‘undeclared’ career path. Our proposed solution is a chatbot that helps users choose their major based on their personal interests, and once they have a general idea of what’s a fitting major for them and what future path this major leads to, we will suggest courses that will benefit them the most and lead them to succeed. Furthermore, if users have any additional concerns, we will also connect them with experts and coursemates in the field to help them out.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
We decided to use one on one interviews and surveys to research our problem. Interviews are a great way to research this problem, because in our problem, we’re trying to find a way to generate highly personalized feedback, and this feedback’s usefulness varies heavily on the specific interests and background a person may have, which is very easy to pick up in a dedicated one on one interview. Our interview participants were three undeclared freshmen/sophomores at UW, who were undecided/heavily skeptical with their career choice and options. We chose to interview freshmen and sophomores at UW because they are more suitable for our research, as they are more likely to have an undeclared major due to various reasons.
For the second method, we decided to use conducting surveys. Conducting surveys will allow us to collect a large amount of data in a relatively short time. We understand that students are busy and won’t be able to set an hour away for interviews, so conducting surveys is the best approach to collect the data we need in a timely manner. Twenty people responded to our survey and they are UW students ranging from freshman to
junior, with over 90% of the participants being freshman/sophomores. We chose to send surveys to such participants because they are closely related to the core concept of our application. We want to know what makes them choose their major (if they have one), or if they are undecided, what caused the struggle and how we can implement methods to help them out.
By comparing their background, current solution and determining its effectiveness, we would have the ability to create a potential solution that is personal and effective. Solution will contain any of the following includes: career suggestions based on interview, what courses to take, in depth explanation of what impact such courses have on their career, course and career feedback from experts/ coursemate.
Design Research Results and Themes
In both our interviews and survey results, we noticed that people would like a way to plan out their coursework and degree such that it prepares them well for their potential career interests. Most people felt in one way or another that, currently, there wasn’t enough guidance or resources available to achieve this. Interestingly, most people also showed a loss in motivation towards their major/degree at some point in their journeys so far. Looking closely, we could also observe that the people who felt that there weren’t many resources available were more likely to feel loss of motivation towards their major/degree. Thus, with these results, it is obvious that the next generation of UW students can make use of a new tool that guides and helps them with their needs — whether it is finding their next coursework or discussing career opportunities based on their major or anything else.
One major theme that we discovered is that most people don’t have and are reluctant to commit to a future plan. Our interviews showed us that most people have a general sense of what they’re interested in. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what sorts of career paths can come out of those interests, and many seem to be reluctant to commit to any one major or career path. Our first interview participant had a very specific interest in computer science, but when they got rejected from the major they didn’t end up pursuing it further because they didn’t want to commit to the difficulty. Our second interview participant also had a very specific interest in pre-med which continued through all of high school, but ended up changing their major in the first week of school, and while they really like computer science, still don’t have a good idea of the career paths that come from this major. Our third interview participant currently has a broad range of interests, but very little commitment to any one of their options, and pretty much no idea about their career options outside of what their relatives have told them. In any case, it is very clear that in order to stick to a major and pursue one’s passion without much difficulty/pressure, students at UW need some form of guidance by other people who have been through the process themselves.
Another major theme that was observed through the research was that students really wanted to explore new courses, but there wasn’t enough information available for them to decide which ones were the right fit for them. For example, one of our survey participants (a CS major taking CSE-351 this quarter) has expressed disheartenment about CSE as a whole because of this one required course, when the CSE major contains a lot of other courses that may align better with their interests and potential career paths. If this survey participant had access to more information about these other courses and the many careers that they can lead to, they wouldn’t have faced this disheartenment. According to our many survey participants, RSO’s are one of the main ways that people successfully explore their interests, and it’s clear that they are a good source of support for people figuring out their majors, career paths and courses. However, our survey respondents expressed a desire for an easier and less committed way than RSO’s to learn more about their interests and find courses that would help grow these interests into a good fit career. Our survey showed that 95% of participants would be willing to try a tool that helps them find the right classes based on their interests and experiences in previous classes
Proposed Design
We decided on our second design, which was a chatbot meant to help people choose their courses and career paths based on their potential interests. Every user is given an assistant bot that helps them navigate their way around finding the right major and classes. The user can tell their interests to the chatbot in the initial getting to know phase (Figure 1) and then based on that they can find what majors and courses align with their interests (Figure 2). If they feel like the major that the bot provided doesn’t match up with their interests or otherwise they don’t want to pursue that major, they can ask the bot for more suggestions (Figure 2). Once a major is selected, the bot will choose some initial courses for the user to take, and display the courses rating by users of the app who have taken the course (Figure 3). Once a user finishes taking the course that was recommended by the bot in the future, the bot will ask the user for a rating, some career paths that would be relevant to the course, and additional comments that the user has about the course so that they can be reviewed by another user looking to take the same course (Figure 4). Once they find some courses to take, the user can ask the bot to connect them with people from that industry, and send the bot their availability (using their calendar data), from which the bot will find a user from the industry who has the same availability and send some contact info to each other (Figure 5). The user can ask this person about job prospects that a major or a course can lead to and thus make a more informed decision on their major and courses.
A chatbot is well suited for our targeted audience because the people we interviewed and surveyed seemed to feel more confident about their choices because of their experiences discussing their options with people close to them, which a chatbot directly mirrors. In normal life, these people tend to talk to people who are close to them, such as their friends in family. However, there is a limit to how much friends and family can help educate another person about career choices. These tasks are compelling not only because they directly mirror people’s everyday interactions relating to their career plans, but also because it’s a very scalable interaction; any potential user can have the feedback of up to the whole user base of the application through both reading through course reviews and matching with people who are knowledgeable about their fields to discuss their options.
