Your Data-Driven Travel Blog

I was a journalism major in college. (This is related, I swear.) I loved writing, but no so much deadlines and talking to people. As a result, I tended to do better in the courses that weren’t reporting (silly, right?). One of my required courses was Graphics & Design taught by professor Eric Meyer. I approached the class with dread. Everyone said the course was impossibly hard and Professor Meyer was among the toughest.

It was and he was, but I loved his class more than anything. 

We learned how to tell stories with graphs and photos and captions and icons. Our final project was to launch an investigative, data-drive website about crime on campus. We submitted FOIA requests from schools across the country, we designed interactive charts and graphics and maps, we designed and built a website from scratch as we learned about HTML and what a server was. That website earned the Society of Professional Journalists award and I got to present the site at a journalism conference with two of my peers.

The point of this trip down memory lane is just that it was this class that taught me that you can’t and shouldn’t paint a picture with words alone. While I’m not a journalist by profession, the data storytelling skills I learned in that class got me to where I am in my career. The job I was hired for was an interview scheduler. I was able to mold that job around my interests and skills in data analytics and basically created my own custom role. 

I recently quit my job, but my itch to track and report has not gone anywhere. This trip is just crawling with metrics and I want to track all of them. Along this journey, we will be tracking every element that we can think of. I’ve tried to think of everything I can right off the bat, but I have a feeling this will be an evolving project of love.

Keep your eyes pealed for our travel data dashboard which should be posted here shortly!

What do you think we need to track on this trip?