Great client service is willing to redraw the map.
The Challenge
The Connecticut Higher Education Trust (CHET) launched the Dream Big! Competition to encourage students across Connecticut to share what their futures could look like with the support of a college savings plan. As entries rolled in, the client asked Mintz + Hoke for a heat map that could communicate participation at a glance.
As an account service intern on the CHET team, I owned the visualization. The client provided several Excel sheets, but the data was not pre-mapped: schools had no addresses, entries were not aggregated by location, and the only tools available to me were Microsoft Paint and a blank outline of Connecticut.
The Solution
First pass: a town-level heat map. I researched the location of every school in the data, grouped entries by town, and built a six-tier color system in Microsoft Paint, ranging from light cream for a single entry up to deep maroon for the highest concentration. A clear legend let the client read density at a glance.
Listening and pivoting. The client appreciated the map but had a clearer vision: they wanted to see where individual schools were located within each town, not just town-level totals. Rather than treat the feedback as a setback, I treated it as direction.
Second pass: a school-level dot map. With an updated dataset, I taught myself to use Google Maps to pinpoint each school's address, plotted a dot at its true location, and scaled the dot size to its entry count. The result was a single image that captured both geography and intensity at the school level.
The Outcome
The client adopted the final map as the deliverable used to recap the competition. Every dot represented real students at a real school whose work had crossed the finish line, and the client could share it with confidence knowing the underlying data had been verified school by school.
This project sharpened the client service instincts I want to carry forward. It required patience to verify each school, resilience to set aside a finished design and start over, and a willingness to learn new tools in service of a better outcome. The standard it set for me is simple: take the time to get it right, and be ready to make it right again when the client asks for more.