There and Back Again

For my GIS day event, I created my own small, informal event at home. The audience was my family, and took place in our living room. I showed my kids the things I've been working on in class, and we played with my son's globe and found things on Google Earth that we picked out from the globe. We talked about the things that you can do with GIS, and the kinds of things I'd like to do in the future once I'm finished with the program. I've had a lot going on in my life, with finishing this program, a new baby, a new dog, illness with my aging parents, etc. It was nice to take a minute and do something fun with my family. School has been a major stressor for me, and I've been absent and frazzled a lot getting things done, but it was nice to remember that I actually really like GIS, and I like sharing things about it with my family and friends.

My internship has been progressing nicely. I've been working with a project team to develop a StoryMap to showcase the Payments for Ecosystem Services program for protecting the endangered Florida Panther. Essentially, the program recruits and pays private landowners to preserve panther habitat, and compensates them for livestock losses from panther predation. My role has been developing the StoryMap and ArcOnline maps to use with it, and so far I've incorporated data like telemetry info from tagged panthers, created a map from tabular data of panther sightings, and used other data sources and maps from the private sector and other government agencies. It's exciting to be supporting such a helpful program!

This module focused on us looking at a GIS dream job, and reflecting on what work we needed to do to get there. While I'm proud of my GIS skills, the job I found would require developing better Python, geodatabase management, CAD, and data analysis skills. This has really gotten me to think about a holistic approach to career development; without necessarily making it a "grindset" outlook, the idea that I need to be looking for opportunities at work to take on projects I can use to develop my skills, and that I need to probably always be doing some kind of class or self-education to improve my marketable skills. My plan right now is to start getting involved in professional GIS organizations, like my local user group and a national women in GIS org, participate in my workplace GIS group, and look for GIS projects I can join at work. I'm going to pitch a StoryMap idea to my supervisor. I'm also planning on enrolling in a Python course immediately after my i...

I am now in my final class for the GIS certificate program at the University of West Florida, where I will be doing a supervised internship with a Florida state agency. The majority of the credit will be from 160 hours of internship work hours, and roughly 1/3 of the final grade comes from classroom assignments preparing us for a GIS career, such as assembling a portfolio, creating a GIS-forward resume, creating or updating a LinkedIn profile, and reviewing job interview skills. I had some initial difficulty securing an internship. I had an internship approved and designed with my former employer, and had already had several meetings with managers and staff, but I had a job opportunity that I left for before it officially began. Fortunately, my internship advisor had a contact that became my current placement. My placement was difficult, because if I couldn't do it with a current employer, I needed to work remotely, because I already work full time and have children. Fortunatel...

This was an interesting lab. Most of it was completed in ERDAS Imagine. We took a high resolution aerial photo of the UWF campus, and used an Imagine function to break it into 50 image classifications. It was "unsupervised" because Imagine chose the classes and class breaks. We then manually went through the attributes table and used the inquire cursor to change every class to one of 5 classes: forest, grass, buildings/roads, shadows, and mixed. We then merged all the rows into these 5 categories and used the recode function to produce a new raster. Using the recoded raster, we then added an area column to the attributes, and calculated the total permeable and impermeable surfaces in the map. In the next part, we did supervised classification, meaning that we selected map features manually by both drawing polygons, and using the grow from seed function and adjusting euclidean distance and neighbrorhood settings to use the program to infer the extent of features. From ther...

This was one of the more interesting labs that we have done. The first part was primarily concerned with fundamental skills in ERDAS Imagine, like using the chip image and subset tool, opening histograms, using the enquire cursor, and exporting data for use in ArcGIS Pro. We also accessed public domain US satellite data to analyze in Imagine. In the later part of the lab, we identified features according to criteria on the lab guide, such as features that caused a spike in pixels in a certain range of brightness in specific EMF bands, and had to use visual analysis and the enquire tools in Imagine to find them. Then, we created maps with combinations of RGB colors in different bands to show off which feature met the criteria. This was interesting, in part, because we had to think about color theory a little bit and why something bright in certain bands, when assigned colors in those bands, would produce the map effects that we got (i.e. if we assigned blue and green to bands where...