I am Adiah Jackson, a student at the University of Arizona and your newest recruit.

Striving for Creativity Within a Mathematical Mind

I have always been mathematically minded, but I have pushed myself to take this logic into the creative realm. I have pursued photography and visual design while working as a data analyst, learned to play the guitar while learning about investing and accounting, and worked for the high school yearbook while doing the Rubik’s cube in under a minute.

Stagnation has always been my enemy, and I attempt to set myself up for a happy and successful life through this pursuit. All artwork and photography on this website are my own.

If you would like to use my creative and mathematical mind, please reach me at adiahj@arizona.edu

Who Am I?

Below is a video that tells you who I am. I have many hobbies and interests. I have taken a special interest in using multiple media forms such as pictures of my past, b-roll, and drone and talking head footage. I hope you enjoy.

Visual Design

Strong visual design has always been very important to me, whether in a more creative field, such as photography using Adobe PhotoShop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro, or in a more structured system, such as PowerPoint or Adobe Illustrator. View below to see some more of my work and consider viewing my Behance portfolio.

One of my favorite things with my brothers is to produce music videos with them. Above is one of my favorites and was worth uploading on YouTube. This is my brother Kaleb, and we used a song produced by a Boise local: TegaMedia. I am from Boise, so this was a very fun experiment. Furthermore, I hope these last as fun time capsules that my brothers will be able to show future friends, family, and maybe even at their wedding.

I used multiple physical and software tools, including a camera, Audacity, and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Above are six of the twelve images I produced for a photo concentration; the goal was to emphasize the photo's subject by turning the rest of the photo black and white. This was done in Photoshop and was a new project I attempted to practice my skill of selecting a subject meticulously. Furthermore, I had to pay a great deal of attention to the subject's color to fit within the overall theme of the concentration. I do have a propensity toward horizontal images. However, sometimes, a vertical image works best for a subject. This is an intuitive feeling that must be developed over time as a photographer. For three years, I ran a photography sole proprietorship where I was selected as the photographer of the year in my high school and lettered in art; selected images from this time can be seen at the bottom of this page.

I also have experience making logos, the above are three of my favorites. The logo for “Cotton’s House Flipping” is likely my all-time favorite because of the negative space within the Wyoming symbol to show a house.

I have spent a long time working toward mastering a wide swath of software. Because of my job as a business analyst, Excel is my second brain, and I tend to use it even for my hobbies and approach my personal development within a scientific method where possible. View below to see some of my work in Excel and Tableau.

Technology Samples

This is a chart I made based on multiple academic papers looking at the activation of abdominal muscles. I am very interested in fitness and health, and through this research, I found that targeting certain abdominal groups is possible and also found the most effective exercises overall. The most “bang for your buck” exercise is the hanging leg raise, followed by extended arms crunch. However, when targeting certain muscle groups, you may choose less effective exercises overall.

As a cost-conscious college student, and building off of my interest in health and fitness, I have built a new strategy to weigh the value of certain food products. This is a calculator I have created in an Excel sheet that will compare new foods to a few basic products. I have only added the conditional formatting to $/calorie and $/gram of protein because these are the most important overall to my needs.

This uses basic calculations such as “=B3/C3” and more complex calculations to find the value of protein powders, such as the formula below to find the total weight of a product in kg, multiply by 1000, and divide by the serving size in grams.

=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!B3,Sheet3!B3:D3,3,FALSE)*1000/VLOOKUP(Sheet3!B3,Sheet3!B3:D3,2,FALSE)

Lastly, in order to expand my world knowledge, I found opensource data on the current populations of the African Countries. I believe it is important to have, at minimum, a surface level knowledge of the world and politics. However, I noticed that many of my peers fail to even name five African Countries after watching a viral video.

For the development of this graph, I ported the .csv data into Tableau and made a color range to match the theme of this website because visual design must be coherent. Then I added labels only for the 10 most populous countries in order to make readability maximized and ovoid congestion.

Writing Samples

Effective communication is critical in any role, but being succinct and effective is necessary in the business world. During college, I practiced business communication through hypothetical situations and real-world practice in my data analyst job. View below to see some samples.

To the left is an email sent to the team in my current job. Conciseness is key in my role so having less than three lines supported by these two visuals is crucial. Clearly, I had to redact some of the information in order to protect my company from sharing proprietary data.

I am also a strong academic writer and good at developing an argument throughout the paper. To the right, you can see a sample of a research paper I produced for an English class, and if you want to read more, click below.

Full Paper

Lastly, I have practiced giving indirect feedback to my teammates. To the left is a message I gave to a teammate in my group project. Some information is redacted for their privacy. The goal of an indirect message is to deliver the news in the most positive light while also being clear. Acting omissive does not help your team but being too frank may leave them feeling vindictive or less likely to accept your feedback.

I used Excel’s conditional formatting by column (with green being best, and red worst) as well as the AVG() function to find the ultimate score of each exercise. The academic paper research was done by assigning an activation level of 100% to the best exercise as a reference point.