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Graduate Student Research Study

  • User Experience Research

  •  Persona

  • Journey Maps

  •  Heuristic Evaluations

  • Research Writing

  • Qualtrics Survey Design

  • Qualtrics Survey Results Evaluation

About This Project

For this project, I surveyed undergraduate and graduate students to find out their motivations for pursuing a graduate degree. The survey also looked at the barriers to pursuing a graduate degree and the reasons why some undergraduates chose not to pursue a higher degree. The study was conducted for my UX+UI graduate class.

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Data Collection Process

I drafted research questions to figure out information I would need to gather from my two demographics—undergraduate and graduate students. I also wanted to find out if these decisions were based on age, gender, financial or career concerns. I created my Qualtrics survey based on these goals, with a set of questions for undergraduate and graduate students. 

Drawing Conclusions
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After I gathered and analyzed the survey data, I wrote a slide deck report with graphs, pie charts, and word clouds to visualize the data. The word clouds and the text answer slides made it easy to read the respondents’ qualitative answers and the visual data representations present a clear visualization of my findings.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • One of the main motivators and paradoxically, barrier to higher education was financial. Students who chose to pursue a graduate degree did so for better pay. Those who decided not to pursue did so because it was too expensive to get a graduate degree.

  • A graduate degree was essential to get an edge in the job market. Most of the students felt a higher education was related to career benefits and better job prospects. They based this on their research into the job market and the average salaried graduates in their field of study.

  • Some students pursued a graduate degree to update their job skills or change a career field.

  • Some undergraduates wanted to delay graduate degrees in favor of job and income security. The reasoning was to save money for a few years to pay for graduate school.

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