Interships | Leafrlgeetlit

Lake Forest Country Day School

About LFCDS

Lake Forest Country Day School (LFCDS) fosters a collaborative, student-centered, and community-driven organizational culture. As an intern there, I’ve been working on the development of an interactive platform that enhances data-driven decision-making for instructors, helping them better understand student progress, identify at-risk students, and tailor their teaching strategies—directly aligning with LFCDS’s mission to nurture a love of learning and prepare students to navigate their paths with purpose.

Intern experience

Details:

Position Title: Non-Profit Data Integration Specialist
Duration: January–May 2025
Organization: Lake Forest Country Day School
Tech Stack: R, Shiny, dplyr, ggplot2, tidyr, CSS, Git

Description: As a Non-Profit Data Integration Specialist Intern, I worked with Lake Forest Country Day School’s MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) testing data to build an interactive, user-friendly dashboard. The goal was to help teachers and administrators analyze student performance, identify at-risk students, and track academic growth over time.

Key Responsibilities & Contributions

Cleaned and preprocessed raw MAP testing data across multiple academic years.
Designed and deployed an interactive R Shiny dashboard with 11+ tabs including:
- Score Histograms by grade/term
- Class comparison charts over time
- At-risk student identification tools
- Interactive student progression tracker
Integrated external CSS for user interface customization.
Conducted user testing with educators and iterated based on feedback.

Skills gained

Technical: R, Shiny, data wrangling, reactive programming, data visualization, dashboard design
Soft Skills: Communication with non-technical users, problem-solving, attention to privacy/confidentiality

Impact & Reflection

Through this internship, we were able to:

Provided teachers with visual tools to better understand student growth.
Helped staff identify underperforming students earlier for targeted interventions.
Improved decision-making processes with accessible, real-time data visuals.

Not only was I able to apply concepts I learned in the classroom to practical problems thanks to this internship but I als0 gained knowledge on how to create data tools that are not only useful but simple enough for non-technical users to understand as well.