Graduation, at its core, is a celebration. A turning of tassels and tossing of caps, signifying an end to academic pursuits.
But for many seniors, graduation brings a torrent of pressure and uncertainty. Balancing personal interests, financial security, and family expectations is a delicate dance — one that makes it incredibly hard to answer the question everyone is asking: What’s next?
As Willow Taylor Chiang Yang aptly describes it: “It’s both confusing and totally understandable at the same time.”
This paradox lies at the heart of her research, which explores how socioeconomic status predicts career decisions among college seniors. As a graduating senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, Chiang Yang isn’t just studying this phenomenon — she’s living it.
Shaping her interests
In 2017, at the age of 14, Chiang Yang knew she wanted to change the world — and decided that politics was the best way to make her mark. She quickly became involved in political campaigns and journalism, fueling her interests in activism and economics, curiosities that would shape her academic experiences.
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When she began studying at The Nueva School outside San Francisco, Chiang Yang took a seventh-grade elective on game theory and economics — her first academic introduction to the subject. Her teacher in that class became a key mentor, inspiring her interest in the intersection of economics, philosophy, and social justice. Years later, Chiang Yang was a student in his high school economics class. Now, she fondly recalls his support.
“He said to me, ‘I knew you as a seventh grader, and you were going to absolutely annihilate all those eighth-grade boys in the class,’” she says with a smile. ”At that moment, I thought economics was something that I could potentially do.”
Chiang Yang explored these interests outside the classroom, too. She founded her high school’s newspaper and began writing for a magazine. Through these experiences, she deepened her understanding of social issues and began to see the connections between media, activism, and the power structures that shape our lives.
Because of her diligent work in high school, Chiang Yang was awarded the Morehead-Cain scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill, which focuses on developing the next generation of leaders. She knew that Carolina was the place to continue exploring meaningful ways to engage with the world.
Finding her focus
When Chiang Yang started her undergraduate studies in 2021, she studied philosophy and created her own major in American political economy. Her academic path set the stage for her evolving research focus, which began to take shape during the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the pandemic reshaped labor markets, particularly with an increase in voluntary resignations, Chiang Yang became intrigued by the idea of a “values reorientation” in the workforce. She initially wanted to analyze long-term trends in work values, comparing shifts in the U.S. and China, even traveling to Shanghai to explore the cultural landscape. Faced with limited access to data, she pivoted her research to focus more narrowly on college-age students at UNC-Chapel Hill.
This pivot was influenced in part by her own experiences as a graduating senior, grappling with the same career anxieties and uncertainties she aimed to explore. She saw that college seniors were at a critical crossroads, making significant decisions about their futures, and recognized that their perspectives could offer invaluable insights into the evolving landscape of work values.
“When we talk about labor and the thing that we spend over a third of our lives doing, of course this is going to be a huge part of how you derive value, how you identify, how you explain living to other people,” she says.
With a clear focus in mind, Willow designed a survey that asked participants to rate 10 key work considerations — from job stability to reputation to personal interest — by placing each into one of three categories: “value it,” “don’t consider it,” or “actively try to reject it/avoid it.” Then, she had them rank the values by importance, providing insight into the magnitude of their preferences.
After hundreds of emails and numerous in-person surveys, Chiang Yang gathered responses from over 240 graduating seniors at Carolina.
“I’ve been lucky to have known and been friends with a lot of different kinds of people from different backgrounds,” she says. “And I’ve heard the variety of things that they’re thinking about.”
So far, Chiang Yang has uncovered some interesting results. For example, participants from lower and middle socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to place higher value on job stability and social impact compared to people from more affluent families. And people of all backgrounds rank their desire for personal fulfillment the same: It’s important.
Her thesis also examines the concept of “economic self-realization,” which explores whether people from different socioeconomic backgrounds truly have sufficient access to the career opportunities that align with their values.
Exploring divides
Outside of her thesis, Chiang Yang has found other ways to engage in research.
After taking a class with Carolina philosophy professor Luc Bovens, she began learning a programming language for data analysis. For the last three years, they’ve been analyzing data from the American National Election Survey and the General Social Survey to understand ideological differences between democrats and republicans with and without a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Their preliminary results indicate that, over the past few decades, preferences have become more strongly aligned with party affiliation rather than education level — a flip-flop from an earlier trend where educational level had a more significant correlation with political views. But Chiang Yang and Bovens have yet to run tests of statistical significance.
“It seems like our hypotheses are holding up, which is super cool,” Chiang Yang reflects.
While she hopes to continue contributing to this project after she graduates, she’d also like to spend a year traveling and then a few years working before pursuing a PhD. She’s enjoyed the research process so much that she knows she wants to do more of it in the future.
That’s because her research isn’t just an academic pursuit — it’s a lens through which she’s examining the world around her. She’s not just asking important questions about career values; she’s considering how to reshape the systems that influence those values.
“I think work has always been a really big part of my identity and a part of how I choose to interact with the world,” she reflects. “And it will continue to be so.”