Web page URL: https://aanayasa.github.io/tswd-portfolio-templates/

Portfolio

This is my public portfolio for Telling Stories with Data at CMU! Here’s where all my cool work will go. You should probably hire me.

About me

Andrea Anaya-Sandoval, She/Her

Hi! My name is Andrea, and I am a first year MSPPM student at Heinz with a background in education and immigration policy. For much of my early career, I was deeply driven by qualitative work. If you had told me a few years ago that I would be working with tools like Python or Tableau, I probably would have laughed. Data always felt like a foreign language to me.

However….As I became more involved in the social sector, I began to notice a clear gap. We were telling powerful stories, advocating for policy change, and identifying urgent community needs, yet we did not always have the data or visualizations needed to connect those realities to decision makers.

I came to Heinz to build that bridge. I want to be the person in the room who can translate data into compelling stories, because behind every number is a person, a community, and an issue actively shaping people’s lives.

Data is still a relatively new language for me, but it is one I am continuously challenging myself to learn. This portfolio is a living record of that process. You will find projects that show me working through messy datasets, experimenting with visualization techniques, learning from what works and what does not, and gradually becoming more confident in this craft.

Thanks for being here. I hope you enjoy watching me become a designer.

What I hope to learn

All the things - obviously.

When I first selected this course, I thought the main thing I would be doing is creating pretty graphs—which, don’t get me wrong, we do! But after just a couple classes, I’ve realized there’s so much more to learn beyond aesthetics.

When does a bar chart tell the story better than a line graph? How do you choose colors that are both accessible and intentional? How do you layout a dashboard so that the most important insight lands first? The honest answer? I don’t know! But I hope that by the end of this class, I’ll have at least a foundation to answer these questions.

I’m also really eager to learn about the different data visualization tools that exist. I know Tableau is one, and I’ve also heard about Datawrapper, but I’m sure there are many more out there. I’m intentionally taking courses that I believe will not only teach me foundational concepts but also allow me to produce materials for my overall portfolio. Eventually I want to move onto other tools like GIS, so I figured this would be a good course to ease me into that world.

Plans for the future

After Heinz, I hope to work as a policy analyst or researcher within education or immigration policy likely through a think tank, nonprofit, or government agency. I’m particularly interested in pursuing a PhD down the line in Education Policy or Public Policy to produce research on the gaps that exist within immigrant and mixed-status families, and the role education plays in their social mobility and economic outcomes.

Portfolio

Visualizing Government Debt: View Project

Assignment 3&4: View Project

Final project

Part I
Part II
Part III

Other stuff you can do (you can remove this section - it’s just for your reference.)

Changing text

You can change text, like this:

Here’s some bold text. Here’s some italic text. Here’s some ~~strikethrough~~ text.

Creating tables

You can build tables like this:

Name	Type of pet	Favority activity 1	FA 2	FA 3	FA 4
Eli	cat	Sleeping	Eating	Being pet	Plotting to overthow dog empire
Howard	dog	You	You	You	Eating
Frankenstein	fish	Swimming	Eating	Blowing bubbles	Forgetting

An easy-to-use template generator tool can be found here

You can use different headings, like this:

Here’s a large title (H1)

Here’s a subtitle (H2)

…and so on (H3)

You get the idea - just don’t forget the space between the # and your title. #Title won’t work, but # Title will.

Adding images

Here’s an example of how to add an image to my portfolio.

funny dog picture

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Alternately, you can set the size of the image using just a bit of HTML:

Remember that you’ll need to upload the image into your repository, or include a link to the image somewhere else.

Setting up a separate page

So here’s the code you’ll need to add to your own site to create a second page.

First, create a new page in your repository (for example, dataviz1.md)
Next, add a link to that page by inserting the following into your readme.md page:

[title](dataviz) or [dataviz](https://cmustudent.github.io/portfolio/dataviz.html) or [CMU](https://www.cmu.edu)

Any of those formats will work. Here’s some examples of working links:

[title](dataviz) = title
[dataviz](https://cmustudent.github.io/portfolio/dataviz.html) = dataviz
[CMU](https://www.cmu.edu) = CMU

Make sure to check these from your publicly accessible URL to make sure they’re working correctly (not from the preview tab).

Looking for more? A nice Markdown guide can be found here

References

List any references you used here.

AI acknowledgements

If you used AI to help you complete this assignment (within the parameters of the instruction and course guidelines), detail your use of AI for this assignment here.