AMPLIFY No Code Scholarship

I currently work at an education nonprofit called WestEd dedicated to promoting excellence, achieving equity, and improving learning for children, youth, and adults. I work on a small team focused specifically on equitable pathways through higher education as a means towards greater economic justice. No-code environments have been essential tools to quickly build data visualizations to communicate complex ideas or data patterns to educators. Part of my mission is to help improve data collection and data collection systems to better understand nuances in programmatic structure and student enrollment patterns. This work, in turn, will allow districts and regions to plan more strategically and fine-tune programs to better, more equitably serve students. With tight deadlines, limited funding, and technology barriers in the education field, no-code environments have made my dreams of innovative data tools possible! In 2019, I led a statewide scan of adult career technical education and workforce preparation courses in California. Currently, the state does not have a data repository for the types of courses offered by adult education schools. I developed a classification system that includes three broad course types, workforce preparation, occupational skills builders, and occupational training programs. These classifications have helped practitioners in the field think more holistically about how their courses align to specific occupations or career pathways in the labor market. While creating graphics and charts can be useful for facilitating meetings, I wanted to build something adult educators could use on their own and customize to their needs. In pursuit of that mission, I created an interactive dashboard in the no-code environment of Google Studio that demonstrates how adult education and community college courses align to occupations. View the dashboard here: https://datastudio.google.com/s/hF7zWyfCXDU In other projects, I have used no-code tools such as Displayr to quickly develop eye-catching graphs to communicate complex data patterns. No-code platforms make it easy to adapt to the needs of educators while creating graphics that communicate data patterns effectively. High impact visualizations are essential tools to inspire educators to take action and think strategically about enhancing their programs to meet the needs of the labor market. I’ve used products like Airtable to build out data toolkits with interactive lists and explanations of resources that educators can take back to their school and stay engaged with data that drives better decision-making. I have excelled at creating easy-to-use data tools and visualizations for educators that align with a mission of economic equity. No-code environments have been essential tools in my work and supporting my career aspirations of building a more equitable education system. My goal in graduate school is to take my expertise in no-code environments a step further to create beautiful and interactive data visualizations that combine education data and labor market data. I hope that these no-code tools will inspire educators to build better educational pathways to high wage jobs.

No-code would help tremendously in my journey to launch an app that I will utilize as a platform for my sustainability aid idea. I am extremely passionate about coming up with innovations or changes that we can realistically implement into society in order to drastically lessen the amount of waste that we create, and cut down the amount of unnecessary harmful byproducts that is produced. As a young student who is entering college to study computer science and coding, with previous entrant knowledge, this would be a great jumping-off point to chase my aspirations and put in the work to make my idea come to life, and hopefully positively affect the well-being of the app users, as well as the planet itself. When it comes to sustainability, small efforts are always valued and we as a society are starting to integrate more eco-friendly options into our households and everyday lives. To promote these values of sustainability and the protection of our natural world, there would be an online store app similar to Amazon or eBay; where for every item searched, solely sustainable options and alternatives will be available for purchase. There would be features that allow the users to search through categories of products for self-care, home life, pets, school, food, work, etc. And options that allow them to filter out certain price points to find more affordable options. Each product's description will detail all the materials used, reviews, and how it compares to other options/ brands for that product in terms of affordability and sustainability. With the convenience of everything being all in one place on an app, this will encourage customers to lead an environmentally friendly lifestyle by emitting less waste from the products that they already purchase every day, and aid them to one day completely rely on eco-friendly products and alternatives in place of all their unethically produced items.