Synapse

Career assessments give you a ranked list. You answer questions, the system spits out occupations sorted by fit score, and you look at the top five. Two problems with that. First, it treats every career as separate — a student interested in urban planning might also connect with public health or environmental policy, but a list doesn't show you those connections. Second, nobody looks past the first few results. The format itself kills exploration.

Synapse asks 13 either/or questions about how you think, what energizes you, and what kind of impact you want. Instead of returning a ranked list, it maps your answers against 460 real occupations (from BLS and O*NET data) on a visual map. Careers that share characteristics sit near each other. You can wander through clusters of related jobs and find connections you never would have found by searching or scrolling.

The first version was a traditional quiz with a ranked list of results. Students looked at the top five and stopped. We redesigned the output as a spatial map and behavior changed immediately — people spent more time exploring and kept finding careers they'd never considered. We started with 20 questions and cut down to 13 through testing, keeping the set that produced the most distinct profiles. All career data comes from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics and O*NET.

Three things stood out from watching how students use spatial results compared to ranked lists:

Synapse is live at sethlooper.com/synapse and is part of the Career Design Lab program at Dartmouth. We're still studying how exploring careers spatially affects the quality of decisions students make afterward, compared to list-based tools.