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International Students
What do my target readers care?
Since my current target reader population is Chinese high school students (staying both in China and in US) together with their parents, I want to see what topics they are most interested in.
Since my account is small (only 130 data points), to figure out this, I used scraped data of a bigger and more successful WeChat public account called 孜循. The data was scraped by another WeChat public account owner and shared with me last year. Looking at what they write about can give me insights on what I should write about more in the future. I extracted the summaries of the account's posts and created the following wordcloud:
Some big words are:
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college (not surprised)
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Canada
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life
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investment banking
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major
Thus, I am planning on having a conversation with my team about this interesting finding and see how we can improve ShareSTEM's content.
I am also planning on openning a more general account - instead of just sharing STEM related information, share about studying abroad in general; instead of targeting only at Chinese audiences, try to make it "international". Thus, I would like to know what's at the core of a study-abroad experience.
To determine this, I scraped the "Student Experiences" blogs on Penn Abroad, where students share their international experiences and give advice. The scraping is done using Google Web Scraper tool.
Extracting the contents of these blogs, I performed a LDA modeling to determine some common, often mentioned, topics.
The above results illustrate five common topics as well as some words that can represent the topic. Although some are hard to decipher, topic 1 points to language, topic 2 points to culture, and topic 4 points to community. Thus, these are some topics that I will consider writing about if I decide to expand ShareSTEM or establish a new and wider platform.
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