Abstract
The intention of this project is to inform students about the short-term and long-term life effects for extending their graduation from four years to five, six, or more years. The benefit for students to use this tool is to give students a holistic understanding of how their current time in college affects future opportunities. In addition, college mentors and advisors can share this tool with students during advising sessions. The primary audience for this project is a computer science major from Sacramento State University and the goal was to aggregate various datasets to design and implement an interactive visualization tool, called "Graduated Life Explore." This tool helps students explore different motivational reasons on the advantages of graduating, as well as the possible risks and disadvantages of delaying their college graduation. Students can have several motivational reasons which illuminate the advantages of a timely graduation, including net costs, extracurricular activities, financial aid possibilities, career opportunities, retirement plans, health insurance, and more. These reasons are represented and encoded into this interactive visualization tool which employs multiple views on different datasets in dividing timeline pie charts with interactive pop out charts.