Normalizing data

[snowboarder234]

This form reflects the current status of a student. Next, the goal is to amend the form to reflect the student's information after they've graduated -- specifically adding an updated website address and department. Since these are graduate students they will generally be employed in the same department in which they studied (earned their PhD). In other words, a history graduate will go on to teach in the history department of another institution. Those instances are not problematic because that department data already exists in the database.

However, the issue that arises is how to handle the exceptions to the rule? Some students will attain employment outside their field of study, aka department, by taking a job in the private sector or government, for example.

So the question then becomes, in order to normalize the data, do I create a table specifically for these anomalies [departments different than the student's field of study] or create a new field in the table which now contains the current departments?

I hope this makes sense.......

[June7]

How much employment history do you care about? Are you interested in only the first job after graduation? Will you just change this data if they tell you they have moved to another?

It is a balancing act between normalization and ease of data entry/edit. At some point you might decide "Enough with the normalization, makes my forms and reports too complicated, I can tolerate a few empty fields in my records." Are you there yet?