Audri Arbuckle

Stats 1040
Term Project

This project is to hopefully show you the differences in pay for graduates from
one career to the next. I have provided some graphs to better demonstrate the
differences between all 7 career fields. My data has come from the US Department
of Labor for the year 2014.

Major Field
Sample
Mean
Sample
Std. Dev.

Computer

ications

Science

54537

46227

59542

40021

60664

38817

41923

7232

7214

4670

2365

7879

7146

4938

Business

Education

Engi-

Humanities

Commun-

neering

& Social
Sciences

Math &
Sciences

As you can see in all of these graphs are different. The ranges are based on
the annual income in each field. Careers such as business, computer science, and
engineering all have much higher pay out then the rest. My chosen career is social
work which falls in the Humanities and Social Science category. The average a
student makes right after graduating is about 40,000. Which is much lower than
other careers. Education which many people especially in Utah go into, generally
make between 37,000 and 41,000. Which is much lower than the average engineer
that makes 53,000-61,000. That is higher than the range for education even goes.
All of these graphs are different between if they are skewed or normal. A lot of them
are skewed slightly, but not a whole lot and it differs from each, some are slightly
skewed left and some are slightly skewed right. I would say that they are normal
distributions. They seem to be fairly even and dont jump extremely one way or the
other.

Maximu
m
Q3

Educati
on

Enginee
ring

Huma
n. &
SS

Math &
Sci.

69490

44591

80236

54220

54261

62485

41654

66541

43100

45183

Busine
ss

Comm.

Comp.
Sci.

71803

62359

59183

51213

Median
Q1
Minimu
m

54728
49173

45420
41592

59835
56808

39857
38684

60042
54762

39600
33539

41939
38453

40745

33282

46785

35250

46475

23114

31920

The only one that has an extreme outlier is Computer

Science.

The payout seems to be much lower and left skewed in

this career.
I think a t-distribution is better suited in this case because
you can not
guarantee that you will only ever add up to 100%
perfectly in the range.

to

Confidence Interval Estimates

The confidence interval describes a range of possible population means based off
the sampling distribution. It is the best way to identify the nature of the population
distribution.
This is a 95% confidence interval for the Humanities and Social Sciences: 36786.71
< < 40847.29
This is a 99% confidence interval for the Business industry: 51859.42 < <
57214.58
This is an 80% confidence interval for starting compensation over 50,000: .3961 <
< .463

A hypothesis test compares and evaluates 2 mutually exclusive statements about a

population to determine which would be best for that specific population.

There is a big correlation between confidence intervals and hypothesis. You use a
test statistic to prove yourself right or wrong. In these 2 cases we did one of each
where we rejected that they Educators made less than 35,000 and that most college
graduates made more than 40,000 a year. The errors that could be possible with
this data is that it was from the state of Utah. Other states may pay more or less. It
was only 350 people surveyed. Only 50 from each category. My conclusion is very
basic. I think that if you take the time to get a college degree you will be able to
support yourself. There are more prestigious degrees as far as money goes, even
though each field is bachelors degree.

Audri Arbuckle
E-portfolio reflective writing

I have learned how to organize data and create different graphs

and models such as histograms, boxplots, confidence interval estimates, and
hypothesis tests. Through this project I was also able to become more
familiar with Microsoft Excel and using formulas such as AVERAGE and
STDEV.S that I will be able to use often in my future career.
I think that the skills that I learned being able to use formulas will
help in any higher math class I choose to take. The part of this class that I
found most interesting was the percentage. I always knew what a percent of
something was. But not always how it was calculated. Such as when you see
a statistic report on the news and it has a + and in the corner it is giving
you a range of what it should be. Like a random poll they did about an
upcoming election.
I think this project made me realize just how important math is to
our everyday life. It tells you how likely you are to get a certain grade, or
how 2 sets of data correlate with one another. In this particular project it
shows us the differences of pay for different bachelors degrees. I always
heard everyone say how great engineers get payed, but the get payed a lot
more than I thought that they did right out of school. And for me who is

going into Social work which falls under the Humanities and Social Sciences
category. Which I knew going in was not going to be a job you go into for the
money. I was happy to see that there was not as big of a gap as what I was
thinking. I think we take advantage of the people that know how to use these
equations to create new things that make our lives easier. This class was
beneficial to see how those decisions are decided and how to know the
process of making decisions based on surveys of the population.