Issue No. 01A Portfolio, Read Like a Magazine
Final-year journalism student who reports with a notebook in one hand and a dataset in the other — seeking a 2027 newsroom fellowship in data & graphics.
The thesis — keep scrolling, the ink fills in
I believe a spreadsheet can break your heart if you read it closely enough. My work starts in public records and ends on someone's doorstep — because a number only becomes a story when you find the person it happened to. I want to spend my career making the invisible patterns of a city legible to the people who live in them.
The Meridian Weekly · Chicago, IL
Cleaned and analyzed 14 months of transit-agency GPS logs to map chronically ghosted bus runs on the South Side. The resulting feature ran on the front page and was cited in a city council transit hearing two weeks later.
The Lakeshore Review — campus paper · Evanridge University
Built the paper's first visual style guide and a reusable chart kit, cutting graphic turnaround from three days to one. Edited and shipped 40+ charts and maps across news, sports, and investigations.
Evanridge University · Dept. of Statistics
Scraped and standardized five years of county eviction filings into a public dataset; wrote the documentation that three student reporting teams later built stories on.
Various local outlets
Verified figures, records, and quotes for long-form features. Learned the discipline that shapes everything else I do: if you can't source it, you can't say it.
Investigation · Front page
14 months of GPS pings, 212,000 scheduled runs, one question: which neighborhoods wait for buses that never come? I wrote the scrapers, ran the analysis, knocked on doors along Route 8, and designed the print and web graphics.
Data feature · Interactive
A FOIA-built dataset of school lunch debt across 62 districts, turned into a scrolling explainer where each dot is a student account. Readers could find their own district; three superintendents responded on record.
Class capstone · Mapping
My capstone-in-progress: joining eviction filings with rent listings to draw "pressure contours" over the city — where rents climb fastest and filings follow. Methodology reviewed by two faculty advisers; publishing spring 2027.
Evanridge University, Chicago — GPA 3.8. Coursework: investigative reporting, data visualization, media law, regression & inference, computational journalism.
Recipient, Harker Prize for Student Public-Records Reporting, 2026.
Two-week workshop on visual storytelling: chart grammar, map projections, and the ethics of an axis that doesn't start at zero.
Chapter — LastCorrespondence
I'm applying to 2027 fellowships and internships in data & graphics journalism. Clips, references, and a very tidy repo of my methodology are one email away.