I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to get comfortable learning things on the job and being able to ask for help when I need it. A lot of times when I was working on trainings, I would get stuck and need to come back to it later, or ask another Vivero fellow if they had the same problem and then we would figure it out together. Especially when working on my project with Prof. Lacson, I would often run into issues that didn’t have a simple fix that I could just look up online. That’s when I would reach out to the Vivero co-leads for help, and we were able to fix things most of the time. I would advise past me to reach out for help more often so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time trying to fix things when it made more sense to ask someone for help.
The training models were pretty easy to use for the most part. I would say they give Vivero fellows a good general idea of the tools you would be expected to use. Something that might be helpful for future Vivero fellows is to have a “Frequently Asked Questions” section on trainings- questions that people who come to drop-in hours might have asked in the past, just so we know some things that might come up when people ask us for help. I know this would be easier to do with some tools rather than others just based off of frequency of use.
Since I am going abroad next semester I tried to leave as much documentation as possible so that whoever (Vivero fellow or anyone else) works on it next semester is able to pick up where I left off. My hope is that the website is fairly functional as is, and that starting next semester improvements can be made to fine tune the site/ make it more user-friendly for students in the class. I think the map could use some working on, and I think the documentation I left will help people build on the work I did this semester.
Since I only started working on the map at the tail end of the semester, I didn’t get a lot of experience with ArcGIS, so this is something I’d be excited to explore more. I think there a lot of capabilities and customizations I’d like to look into that I only got to play around with a little this semester. Mapping projects were what I was interested in coming into Vivero this semester, so now that I have a more concrete idea of what that would look like I have more specific ideas of what I’d like to work on.
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