This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://education.rstudio.com/blog/2021/01/aaron-durham-mentorship-wrapup
In the fall semester of 2020, RStudio piloted a program to provide mentorship to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students in data science. I had the opportunity to participate in this program, and used it to focus on learning and developing my skills with R. Over the course of three months I worked closely with Janeka Handford of RStudio, who went the extra mile ensuring that I not only reached the goals outlined via the mentorship but also gained a much deeper understanding of R coding processes in general. Through our combined efforts, I was able to build a small interactive shiny app that explored the geographic data of wildlife-vehicle collisions in North Carolina between 2014 - 2018. With the shiny app dashboard, we were able to sort our data by county and year allowing for specificity. Shiny has really shown me how vast amounts of data can be easily filtered and used in geographic visualizations, and how much fun it can be to learn by building.
