Student’s Interests and Career Understanding: A Topic Analysis of First-year Career Courses

Abstract

This study conducted a topic analysis of the free-text reports submitted by the students to ex-amine the outcomes of their first-year career courses. There were two types of reports: 1) asking students why they were interested in a lecture, and 2) how they understood careers to be important as an outcome of the course.In the analysis, both reports were used as the data set, and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was used to estimate the topic model, and Gibbs sampling was used to estimate the parameters. Students were classified into five types according to the lecturesthey were interested in. The analysis confirmed that for the 14 topics extracted, each student type had a unique topic that emerged as the reason for their interest. It was also found that many of the student types tended to have a long-term understandingof career as “their life itself.” The result of the analysis also found that there may be a reciprocal phenomenon regarding key topics in the students’ interest and career understanding.