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So close yet so far
Although Skydiving has been one of the greatest experiences of my life, my trip didn't leave me much time in the area of school work, and right now I am paying for it. As I may have mentioned before, most of my classes are doing group projects for the remainder of the semester. Although it's great that there is not as much stress to continuously study what I just learned for finals, it does create a lot of stress in terms of making deadlines with some of these impossibly hard projects.
The thing about these projects is that there are no step by step instructions, so problem solving on your own is a huge must. The professors are there for us though. I've approached all of them at least 10 times in the last 3 weeks. It gets really frustrating at times because I'll continuously work on a set of data for a map, but after maybe 2 straight hours of manipulating I still don't have a
finished product. It also makes it hard because all the work has to be done at the computer lab. A lot of the software we use in GIS is very new therefore VERY expensive and impossible to have on our home computers.
The class I'm working on the most is my Environmental GIS class, the one where my lab partner and I addressed an environmental issue using GIS. Well for a while we thought that everything had been under control, but as of lately this project has become some kind of monster and it's getting me a little worried. The data sometimes doesn't cooperate with us, but that's really what any geographer can expect. The one thing that has surprised me the most about the project is the amount of knowledge I have learned in the last 3 semesters as a geography major that I have applied to this project. One class that I have had to draw upon a lot was a class I took last semester GEOG 366.
GEOG 366, Geographic Information Science is basically the introductory course for the GIS concentration. In the class we learn about how GIS is applied in many functions, and we work continuously creating a data set. The professor, Dr. Kraenzle, selected a map of Bavaria as the dataset we were going to create. We started from scratch literally, creating our own digital outlines of Bavaria, and then adding data to it manually. Our dataset was obviously very small, or else I would still be in 366 adding attributes. We also created features such as rivers, cities, and highways. This class established a foundation for my future classes in GIS, and I am sure I will be using the lessons learned in this class a little bit more than many of the other classes I have taken.
As for the class I am taking now, I may be stressed but the thought that I am only 1 week of classes and 1 more week of finals away from the summer is what is keeping me going. The time is misleading though, I have a lot of work to go and I can't stop now. The summer...so close yet so far.
Posted by Simeon on April 21, 2005 04:07 PM | Link | Email Simeon
