Assembling your final portfolio

Week 14 — from an organized folder to a coherent, submission-ready final portfolio

A short conceptual reading on what it means to assemble your final portfolio: curating across the four areas of the course, running a final reproducibility pass, finalizing a portfolio map a reader can follow, and becoming submission-ready — without writing the reflection or submitting yet (both happen in Week 15). The companion hands-on walkthrough for getting your folder in shape is Lab 9 — Organizing your portfolio folder (and an optional Git workflow), and the conceptual frame is Organizing your portfolio folder, the easy way. The exact final-portfolio prompt, due date, submission details, and grading live in the Assignments/LMS space.

Week 13 got your math-software-portfolio/ organized — audited in place, with a one-screen portfolio map and your AI Use Notes surveyed, and a reflection plan jotted down. Week 14 is the assembly week: you turn that organized folder into a coherent, complete, reproducible final portfolio that is ready to submit.

You stay in the same VS Code + R + Quarto + TinyTeX stack you have used since Week 1. There is no new editor, no new render engine, no new required package, and no folder restructuring — assembly works inside the layout you already have.

Where Week 14 sits: organize → assemble → reflect

The last three weeks of the course form a short arc:

  • Week 13 — organize. Get the working folder in order: each piece in its own subfolder, source and rendered output together, a portfolio map at the root, AI Use Notes surveyed, and a plan for the reflection.
  • Week 14 (this week) — assemble. Turn the organized folder into the final portfolio: curate what represents you across the four areas, confirm everything still renders, finalize the map as a reader’s guide, and get submission-ready.
  • Week 15 — reflect and submit. Write the 1–2 page reflection you planned, do a final polish, and submit through the course LMS.

Week 14 is deliberately a studio week — protected time to assemble and polish, with no new material to learn. There is no required conference this week. (If your Week 13 conference was moved into this week, that still counts as your Week 13 conference, not a new one.)

What “assembling” adds beyond “organizing”

Organizing was about order. Assembling is about coherence and completeness. Four moves carry the week:

  1. Curate across the four areas.
  2. Run a final reproducibility pass.
  3. Finalize the portfolio map / front-matter.
  4. Become submission-ready.

The rest of this note takes each in turn.

1. Curate across the four areas

Your final portfolio should show your growth across the four areas of the course:

  • Mathematical writing — your LaTeX/Quarto work (the early weekly documents and the latex-project/).
  • Computation with R — your R-in-Quarto reports, your visualization, your simulation, and the r-project/.
  • Reproducible workflow — clean folder organization, source kept with rendered output, relative paths, render-twice habits.
  • Responsible AI use — your AI module work (hw11/, hw12/) and the AI Use Notes you wrote across the term.

Walk your folder and, for each area, identify the work that best represents what you can do. Because of the best-9-of-11 weekly rule, some weekly folders may legitimately be missing — that is fine. Curation is about making sure each of the four areas is represented by work you kept, not about having every folder.

2. Run a final reproducibility pass

A portfolio is only credible if it still runs. Pick the artifacts you intend to include and re-render each one from source on your current machine to confirm it produces a clean output. The habit is the same one you have used all term:

quarto render hw08.qmd

If something does not render, fix the smallest thing that is broken — usually a relative-path issue or a missing input file — and render again. Two common fixes:

  • replace any absolute path (like C:/Users/yourname/Desktop/data.csv) with a relative path so the work renders on any machine;
  • make sure any data or image a document needs lives inside the portfolio, referenced relatively.

When the pass is done, every artifact in your portfolio renders cleanly from source. That is what “reproducible” means in practice.

3. Finalize the portfolio map / front-matter

In Week 13 you added a short portfolio map (a README.md at the root). This week, finalize it into a clear front-matter that a reader can follow without you: name each major folder, say in one line what it contains, and make the four-area structure visible. A reader should be able to open your portfolio and, in one screen, see what is inside and how it maps to the course.

A folder shaped roughly like this — yours will differ — is what an assembled portfolio looks like:

math-software-portfolio/
├── README.md          one-screen map of the portfolio
├── hw01/ … hw0N/      weekly artifacts (writing, then R work)
├── latex-project/     the LaTeX Project (mathematical writing)
├── r-project/         the R Project (computation)
├── hw11/  hw12/        the AI module (responsible AI use)
└── reflection.qmd     the final reflection (written in Week 15)

Leave a reserved reflection file at the root — you write the reflection in Week 15, not this week.

4. Become submission-ready (without submitting)

By the end of Week 14 your portfolio should be in the form you will submit — organized, complete across the four areas, everything rendering, with the map finalized and the reflection slot reserved. You do not submit this week. Getting submission-ready now means Week 15 is a finish, not a scramble.

The exact submission steps, the due date, and how the portfolio is evaluated are in the Assignments/LMS space for the course. This note is about the concepts of a good assembly; the operational details live in the LMS.

Keep your reflection plan warm

In Week 13 you planned the reflection — a few bullets on which artifacts show growth in each area and what you want the reflection to say. Keep that plan handy this week. As you assemble and re-read your work, you will notice evidence worth pointing to; jot it down. But do not write the reflection itself this week — that is the Week 15 deliverable. A warm plan plus an assembled portfolio is exactly what makes Week 15 straightforward.

Looking ahead

  • Week 15 — Final polish and the portfolio reflection. Write the 1–2 page reflection you planned, do a last polish, and submit the final portfolio through the course LMS.

Week 14 gets the portfolio itself into finished shape so that the final week is about reflecting and submitting, not assembling.

The exact final-portfolio prompt, submission mechanics, and due date live in the course LMS.