Visualization of Undergraduate Grades

I was thinking today that now I have all my undergraduate grades and they represent the largest set of quantitative data I have about myself. So, I started analyzing them and thinking of interesting ways represent them. This is the first thing I came up with:

Each bubble represents the classes I've taken in a particular department. The diameter of a bubble corresponds to the number of credits in that department and the color corresponds to the GPA. The bubbles are sorted around in a clockwise spiral by number of credits then alphabetically. I used a sequential color scheme I got from ColorBrewer - a handy tool for picking color mappings based on Cynthia Brewer's 1999 paper Color Use Guidelines for Data Representation.

As you can see, I've taken almost equal parts Math, Applied Math and Computer Science classes and all of my department GPAs are above a 3 (which is a B). I think this image tells a fairly accurate story of my undergraduate career. I thought I would be a computer science major so I took mostly math courses to establish a theoretical basis for what I thought I'd be doing but ended up an applied math major with a computer science minor. When I wasn't taking math or computer science courses I was able to take courses in other fields that interested me and I did roughly equally well throughout.

This is so far my favorite way to slice up the data but it loses all the chronology. To fix this I'm thinking about making this interactive by adding filters for institution (since I attended two) and semester and possibly the ability to click on each bubble to see the classes it is composed of.

In case you aren't familiar with the department acronyms:

MAT = Math
AMS = Applied Math
CSE = Computer Science
PHY = Physics
BHS = Behavioral Science
CIS = Computer Information Systems
ENG = English
LIN = Linguistics
EST = Technology and Society
HUL = Romance Linguistics
JRN = Journalism
LSE = Living/Learning Center: Science and Engineering
WFE = Wellness and Fitness