Week Six

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Accomplishments

Considering that this week is as short as it is I actually did accomplish quite a bit. My first accomplishment was adding some new categories to my excel sheet. I went back through and added whether each school was black or white, and I added county data as opposed to the geo codes I had before as I realized that the county the schools were in mattered far more than the exact points. My second accomplishment is getting my map put together. I still need to do a bit more refining to make the colors look a bit better and some of the data appear without cutting off, but having it done puts me in a good spot for my conclusion. My third accomplishment was safely driving to little rock. That 8 hour drive was not the easiest at times.

Things I learned

Getting to do my map this week allowed me to actually apply many of the things I learned in our gis lectures. The first thing I learned was what makes Q mad and what makes it slightly less made. Luckily negatives did not make it angry. In general Q worked pretty well with enough tinkering and help from others. The second thing I learned was that while on paper I do have a lot left, in actuality I don't have a crazy amount to do and I'm fully on pace. As I begin to fully check things off my list I feel better about the coming weeks. My third thing I learned was that Bill Clinton was the first president to recognize Hannukah and Kawanzaa. I learned many other things while at the Bill Clinton presidential library but that one really stuck out to me as I would have though another would have recognized the before him. We also got to see a revolution reenactment for the fourth of July.

Roadblocks

I didn't have all that many roadblocks this week as it was short and I had clear goals outlined going in. One very easy roadblock is QGIS's temperament and lack of simple UI. While I do know how to operate a computer, I am in no means a programmer or an expert. QGIS is hard to use, luckily I have been able to get help but I am glad I am close to done with it. The second roadblock is only having a few days of actual work. While I am half glad it worked this way as it motivated me to get stuff done in the first half of the week, it still put pressure to figure out all the little issues. The third roadblock is the program almost being done. Having a hard deadline coming up not only adds pressure to get things done but also makes me sad knowing that these are the last weeks I will get to spend with the people in this program.

What's next

Next week is going to be a lot. I plan to write and complete the end of my paper then go through and revise the rest of it. Once that is done I will get started on the presentation which I don't think should take long as its just taking the concepts I will have just revised and putting them to slides.