Lauren Ban (Pitt) - Honorable Mention, West Higher Ed

Judges' statement

Lauren’s goal was to preserve communities of interest. In her personal statement she described the care she took in determining which municipalities related more to Butler County and which to Pittsburgh. We thought the overall look of her map was good while noticing she  had good scores in the objective metrics, as well.

Personal statement

In examining the way the districts were split, I not only considered the population growth and contiguity as guiding metrics, I also considered the identity of the areas included in those districts. So when determining which municipalities were to be in 2 versus 3, I considered how those municipalities related to Butler and Pittsburgh, respectively. This factored into my values of communities of interest and jurisdictional divides.