2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The focus of this work in progress paper is to share a newly developed tool that utilizes a weighted decision matrix to assist individuals in making “big life decisions”. When faced with complex, intricate decisions in industry, many project and safety management programs employ decision matrices or failure modes and error analysis (FMEA) to help teams come to a more comprehensive conclusion as to what direction they should take to make the highest impact based on quantitative analysis. These types of tools could also be helpful to an individual making an impactful life decision in that they allow a user to brainstorm all essential factors that are most important to them and ultimately derive final numerical scores to rank multiple potential opportunities. Opportunities include potential jobs, graduate or undergraduate schools. Examples of factors include job location, starting salary, compensation packages, professional responsibilities, scholarship opportunities, potential mentors, or career/livelihood needs for a partner. Factors are grouped by type on separate tabs on an Excel spreadsheet. For each factor, the user decides how important it is relative to other factors inputting integers ranging from 10 (highest importance) to one (lowest importance). The user then grades each factor for each opportunity by entering an additional set of integers ranging from zero (does not have / meet expectation) to five (well above expectations). The tool then multiplies the grade of each factor for each opportunity by the factor weight. The weighted scores from each factor are summed for each opportunity, ultimately yielding numerical values to allow the user to rank each opportunity as a function of all the weighted factors. To date, this tool has been used to help (1) high school students decide where to attend college, (2) undergraduate students choose which job to take or which graduate school to attend, and (3) faculty candidates determine where to start or continue their careers. Future work entails further utilization of the tool in addition to the collection of data from users of the tool to evaluate its impact.