Student: SND Challenge mentor ‘taught us how to think as journalists, designers and developers’

Editor's note: The SND Challenge is a program that provides college-level students with mentoring from professionals in design, data and data visualization, information graphics, visual storytelling and development at organizations around the globe.

The program's inaugural cohort in 2026 included more than 70 students divided into 17 teams from CENTRO - Diseño, Cine y Televisión in México, Ohio University, Universidad Argentina de la Empresa and Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo in California.

On the Cal Poly team were Carly Heltzel, Grace Gillio, Archana Pisupati, Anika Loganathan and Leila Touati. Their advisor was Kim Lisagor Bisheff, who has taught in the college's journalism department since 2004. For the Challenge, the group was paired with Lily Boyce, a graphics editor at the New York Times.

Below, Touati gives a first-person account of her team's project and what she learned during the SND Challenge.

Before entering the SND Challenge, our team had already completed the majority of the reporting for our 5,000-word story about how the experience of minority students at our predominantly white university has remained remarkably unchanged over the last 30 years.

In 1995, students of color wrote an open letter to Cal Poly detailing incidents of isolation and discrimination. Back then, Black students made up just 1.9% of the student body.

Using the open letter as a starting point, we spoke with members of cultural clubs and faculty of color. We also interviewed an alum who attended Cal Poly when the open letter was published.

From their stories, we found that the same patterns of isolation, disregard and transgressions described in the open letter were continuing to impact current students of color. Recent data is stark: Blacks accounted for just 0.8% of Cal Poly's student population in 2025.

To honor the perspectives that were shared with us, we titled our project "Perspectives: 30 years later."

Ambitious visual storytelling ideas

We had ambitions of being more creative with the graphics for this project and making something that exceeded the limitations of our college newspaper website's default article template.

The knowledge and experience of our SND Challenge mentor, Lily, helped us look at the bigger picture for large reporting projects. She pushed us to have the audience front-of-mind. When we had no clue how to make our storyboards a reality, she provided insight and taught us how to think as journalists, designers and developers.

Making the concept a reality

For the design of our piece, we wanted to build a webpage that showed the powerful ratio of only 182 Black students enrolled in our university of over 22,000 and go beyond a traditional line chart at the top of our story. I built an interactive using small graphics of students, which grew in number as the reader scrolled through the story. I spent hours perfecting the appearance and movements of graphics fading into the screen, dealing with hex codes of all the colors so it was easily visible, but still portrayed the darkness we wanted the piece to feel.

With Lily's help, we built a parallax page with those moving graphics, autoplaying videos and looping illustrations for every section of our story. Because our story had seven different sections, she suggested we work on an interactive progress bar to show the reader where they were in the piece.

Being a part of the SND Challenge helped us learn how to tell stories in a non-traditional way and think outside the box of what was possible for illustrative storytelling. With the SND Challenge, we made an amazing connection with our mentor and it was a dream for us to workshop our project with an incredible professional who has experience in working with illustrations and code.

About the author

Leila Touati is a recent graduate of Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo and was a finalist for the Reynolds Journalism Institute Student Innovation Challenge, for which she built an interactive quiz to increase engagement and traffic to her university's news website, the Mustang News. She is an Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker and won Best of Show after running the Mustang site for two years. She currently works as the business and change reporter for The San Luis Obispo Tribune. In her spare time, she is learning React and is always looking for her next venture or project.

Read the Cal Poly team's project on GitHub .

Find out more about the SND Challenge.