Career path analysis of professionals selected by MIT undergraduates

Abstract

For current MIT undergrads, life after graduation can seem daunting. With uncertainty about job duration, graduate school, and career paths in general, many undergraduates enter the real world unsure of what the future holds, or if what they have decided to do post-graduation is the "best" option. As such, MIT undergraduates in the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) were asked to interview professionals that they believed had jobs they would one day also like to have. This resulted in a large dataset of career paths for an extremely diverse group of individuals, all with their own unique stories and time-lines. This data was filtered, cleaned, and analyzed to gain insight into life after graduation. From the analyzed data it was found that the distributions of durations spent at graduate school, in companies, or in specific job titles were all not significantly different, and the average duration spent in each of these options was 2-6 years, with some noticeable outliers. Overall these analyses showed that there are many options for students in the first 10 years after completing their BS, and there is no clear "correct" option to choose from.