Once the Department of Economics approved a special topics course, I was quick to recommend Economics of Crime. During graduate school, I gravitated to Gary Becker and his work on large social issues like families, discrimination, human capital, and migration. Getting to teach labor economics, I was able to bring a lot of his work into the course, specifically in the "special topics" portion of the course that focused on more applied areas of labor economics.

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A second motivation for how I designed the crime course was feedback I had gotten from former students regarding my labor economics course. That course requires the completion of a small data project focused on labor markets for teachers or baseball players, which was the same project I did when I took Darren Grant's labor economics course at Sam Houston State University. Students came back and told me that interviewers were asking about projects they had worked on, specifically data-drive projects, and they were able to talk about this project with potential employers. Many of the students also mentioned that they shared their reading lists with interviewers and this received high praise. As a result, I knew the crime course needed popular press readings and data-driven projects. I settled on Tableau as the software to use for creating the visualizations because it was free to students, allowed uploads to a public profile, and is relatively easy to use.

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Below you'll find the finished dashboards that I have created as examples for the students when creating their dashboards. Each of the projects covers large datasets that revolve around topics we covered in the course in the prior weeks. The final project is that students have to create a website (similar to this page) with their dashboards, write-ups, and a resume.