Perceived Life-Readiness from Real-World Curriculum Experiences of Alumni
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Students pursue college degrees expecting to learn skills necessary to navigate adult life. While this is the expectation of most students, there is a lack of research examining the perceived effectiveness of real-world applicability in undergraduate degrees.Objective. The purpose of this phenomenological and constructivist study was to explore how college alumni perceive their educational experiences in terms of real-world preparedness.Methods. Eight participants in their mid-twenties (5 females, 3 males) were selected using purposeful sampling. Participants participated in informal, semi-structured, one-on-one Zoom interviews and demographic questionnaire responses.Results. Emerging themes indicated that alumni felt the relationships formed had a greater contribution to their life-readiness compared to their real-world curriculum. Other emerging themes revealed alumni believed they developed valuable skills through hands-on experience and group work. Recommendations were made by alumni for curriculum changes, including smaller class sizes and inclusion of more practical courses.Conclusions. Based on these findings, future research should aim to replicate this study using a broader range of alumni to further investigate this phenomenon, as well as studies that investigate various college types and student experiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".