I always reach the end of the semester having completely forgotten about what happened in the beginning. The only difference between this class and other classes is that I have a website. I am very fond of my website, I have put a lot of effort making it exactly what I want, and on top of that I have had the pleasure of documenting the past few months within my own cyber space (I think that is what you would call it but I actually have no idea). While I feel as though I have posted enough to have a grasp of the last few months, my posts have definitely been the hardest part of this website. The main component behind my love of my website is the professionalism of “selling” yourself to the rest of the world. It is for this reason that posting was so difficult; my posts are infrequent because each one should be showing my best face forward to the world. Over the past semester I have been getting over this little concern of mine. I don’t think the frequency of my posts have changed much but they have definitely reflected more of my personality and reflection on class and recent events. I’m proud that I have been able to open myself up as I have to the rest of the world and continue that as I add other classes on this site. My next step for myself is to work on sharing outside sources (with PressThis) and sharing my thoughts on them. I didn’t do that much this year but I would like to.
I am also ending this semester with two large accomplishments: the completion of the concentration process, and the presentation of the independent projects in lab. The concentration process was what I classify as something that I love, but don’t like. It was difficult and I hated every step, but it was necessary and a huge step in the furthering of my major. All in all, even thought is is frustrating as hell to figure out what you want to do after only three semesters at LC, I now know what the next five semester are going to look like and I don’t need to worry about the direction I am going. As hard as it is to start, once you have, you are able to really choose your own path. Many people go into the ENVS major because they want to be able to do just that, but once they get to ENVS 220 they don’t realize just how hard it can be to “make your own major”.
The final lab projects that we have been working on are an interesting component to the class. There are a lot of requirements to the project, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. More requirements means we need to use more of the tools and skills that we have been working on, but it also means that we spend less time on each of the components. I think I would have preferred to independently go over each of the tools and use them a second time. With the project, since I had two other members and we had a lot to go over, we each took a different part to complete. As a result, I didn’t get to remind myself how to do a number of different things, specifically ArcGIS and SPSS. However, I really like that we made posters. Posters are a big part of senior year presentations, and I am glad that we got a little run-through of how they are created.
I really enjoyed this semester, I learned a lot and I am excited to apply all of this to other classes! Over and out.