About

Planning for people, planning for the future.

I'm Matthew Sayers, an urban planning student at the University of Cincinnati. I'm interested in where housing gets built, how people get around, and how neighborhoods get a say in what happens next.

Right now I'm on co-op with the City of Kettering, Ohio, splitting my time between the planning office and property inspections out in the city's neighborhoods. Before starting at UC, I spent a summer volunteering with Chattahoochee Riverkeeper in Atlanta, where I tested water quality and helped with cleanups along the river.

On campus I run social media for the Urbanism Club and help put together presentations on planning projects in other cities. I'm still early in learning ArcGIS and AutoCAD, and I want to put both to work on real projects as soon as I can.

1. May to July 2024 · Atlanta

   Chattahoochee Riverkeeper

   Volunteer and intern. Collected water quality data along the river and its tributaries and worked on watershed cleanups.

2. Cincinnati

   University of Cincinnati

   BA in Urban Planning with a minor in Business Administration. Cincinnatus Scholar, and social media chair for the Urbanism Club.

3. Aug to Dec 2026 · KetteringYou are here

   City of Kettering, Planning and Development

   Planning intern on co-op: research reports for staff, a landscape standards benchmark, and field inspections in the neighborhoods.

4. May 2029

   Graduation

   Bachelor of Arts, Urban Planning.

• Bachelor of Arts, Urban Planning

  University of Cincinnati · May 2029 · Minor in Business Administration

  Cincinnatus Scholar

  Coursework: Introduction to Urban Planning, Intro to ArcGIS, Urban Design, Statistics, Planning for Urban Economies, Land Use Planning, Urban Planning Law, Studio

• Housing development
• Transit
• Community engagement
• Urban design & urbanism
• Clean water & environmental stewardship
• Modernizing planning technology
• Modernizing how local government plans

Design

• Adobe InDesign1 project
• Photoshop2 projects
• Illustrator2 projects

Planning & CAD

• ArcGIS1 project
• QGIS (MCP)
• AutoCAD
• SketchUp2 projects

Productivity

• PowerPoint
• Excel1 project
• Word
• Power BI

Skills with a count link to the projects that used them.

I don't list coding as a skill, because I don't write the code. Every piece of software on this site, from the parcel screen to the zoning search engine to the small apps below, was built by describing what I wanted to Claude Code, checking what came back, and pushing on it until it did the job. That process is what interests me. A planning student with no programming background can now build a screen over 98,000 parcels or a search engine over 2,900 zoning codes in a week, and the useful skills turn out to be the planning ones: knowing what question to ask, where the data lives, and whether an answer is wrong.

See the vibe coding projects

Also built

• Coop Log, a native macOS work journal for my co-op, with Markdown export and term summaries.
• Ploutos, a local macOS app that reads my card statements, bank exports, and brokerage files, and uses an on-device language model to explain what it finds.
• Calorie Tracker, a local-only desktop tracker that turns a plain sentence into a logged meal.