An automated, zero-cost ETL data pipeline and 4-page interactive Looker Studio framework for tracking STEM mentorship impact
# End-to-End STEM Mentorship Data Pipeline & Analytics Framework
## 📌 Project Overview
👉 **Click here to explore the Live Interactive Looker Studio Dashboard!**
This project establishes a low-cost, production-grade Data Engineering and Business Intelligence pipeline for a regional STEM Mentorship Program in South Africa. Facing realistic budget constraints, I bypassed expensive cloud warehouse tools in favor of an optimized Google Workspace & Cloud ecosystem.
The pipeline automates the extraction of raw session logs, programmatically injects localized demographic data, cleans critical formatting anomalies via Python, and serves a live, interactive 4-page dashboard to departmental stakeholders.
### Key Impact Highlights:
* **Zero-Cost Infrastructure:** Built entirely using free-tier cloud resources, proving scalability under tight budget constraints.
* **Algorithmic Data Enrichment:** Programmatically injected localized geographical and institutional profiles (Pretoria, Joburg, WITS, UP, etc.) to evaluate regional D&I impact.
* **Stakeholder-Driven Design:** Delivered custom views tailored specifically for Operations, Curriculum, Finance, and Outreach executives.
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## 🛠️ System Architecture
The pipeline follows a classic ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pattern:
1. **Ingestion (Data Lake/Staging):** Raw CSV data is ingested into a non-converting staging layer in Google Sheets (`Raw_Data`) to preserve formatting anomalies.
2. **Processing & Transformation (ETL Engine):** A Python pipeline built in Google Colab handles secure OAuth2 authentication, reads the staging layer into Pandas, and applies critical business logic.
3. **Data Warehousing (Production):** Cleaned, standardized data is programmatically written to the production database layer (`Clean_Set`).
4. **Analytics & Visualization (BI Layer):** Looker Studio consumes the production layer, offering cross-filtering capabilities for end-users.
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## 🐍 Data Transformation & Business Logic (Python)
The ET …