Hello everybody, a big thank you to all who are reading this! This is the first of a (hopefully) regular series of blog posts I will be making about my internship for this summer. Here, I’m planning on recapitulating some of the major activities I got to do for the week via photos/videos/writing, as well as just keep all you wonderful people updated with my life.
As this is the first week, I might as well start with an introduction: I’m Robert Colley, but you can call me Rob, I’m a California native who decided to travel all the way up to New York initially to study at Cornell as a Physics major. This of changed rather quickly to (Mapping? Cartography) [WRONG] Chemistry, which I’m planning on receiving my Bachelor’s for this coming year. I’m in the College of Arts and Sciences, which begs the question, what are you doing in an internship meant for Agriculture and Life Sciences? To which my response is, I’m not 100% sure but I’m happy to be here, I’m someone who can get interested in just about anything as long as I can explore it, and in the case of maps, there seems to be so much to explore, so here we go!
What happened last week?
So, this week, we’ve been in the planning phase. I had a few meetings with my three main supervisors, Kelly Adams, Susan Hoskins, and Charles Malone (picture below) where we laid the groundwork for this next week, and figured out a working schedule for our group over the summer. I’m pretty grateful to them taking the initiative here, since I’m not the greatest at planning when I’m on my own.
I also shadowed a brief meeting with Susan, Kelly, and Alexa Mille, a woman presenting an upcoming Career explorations workshop, and who was looking for some insight on how to incorporate mapping into an opening survey.
In addition to all that, I got to work with GIS, working on some interactive tutorials with the mapping software that I’ll be using all summer, ArcGIS. So what is it? In short, its a software which lets us create and manipulate data via maps, and there are a LOT of ways in which we can do this. In my short experience working with ArcGIS, I’m already seeing how we can use GIS (Geospatial Information Science) to do all sorts of useful things, from coming up with plans for urban development, figuring out how we might use water for irrigation practices, or even making an interesting graphic for your local club presentation. I think my favorite practice activity (as of now) has been making a map of the evacuation routes in Houston overlaid with demographic information showing potential at risk locations in the overall area. You can check my map out here if you’re interested: (https://nysgglead.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/minimalist/index.html?appid=84bdf8857a0943919ef93c526b4c1584).
So whats going on this week?
I’m so glad you asked! This coming week, I’ll be attending a 3-day online conference dubbed GeoEd ’21, which normally happens to be a rather large in-person conference, however in the world of COVID-19 this unfortunately has not been the case. The conference is hosted by Esri, the company that created the software I’ll be using this summer, ArcGIS. The GeoEd conference is going to be covering a lot of topics directly related to the software, and should help me to get more familiar with it, so I actually know what I’m talking about when I’m using it to work with youth this summer.
(unrelated) In addition to this, this also is the week that my online classes will be starting! As I’m in California for about 2 1/2 weeks, this means I’ll be getting up at 5:30AM pretty much everyday in order to make class, and then going to conferences afterwards (pray for me).
Well, I suppose that’s enough for now, thanks for taking the time to read my post! Have a wonderful day! – Rob
