Reflections on the Geospatial Fellowship program

My experience working on the GSF project has been very rewarding and enjoyable. I liked the flexibility of being able to focus my research based on my specific interests and expertise while keeping it inside the broader theme of reproducibility and accessibility. The fellows meetings and webinars gave me the opportunity to learn about what my colleagues were doing for their projects and to address questions with the project team.

The biggest challenge I faced was to learn the basics of Jupyter notebooks. When I started the project, I had no experience using the tool and had only limited knowledge of Python. The community notebooks on the CyberGISX portal were helpful as introductory material to help me get started with notebooks. I also had several one-on-one meetings with staff (Becky Vandewalle) who helped me troubleshoot issues I had as I was developing the notebooks. In the end, I was happy with the outcome as I was able to put together two notebooks with code samples related to the analysis I applied in my project. This experience has motivated me to pursue other learning opportunities to develop my skills in coding and notebook development.

A special ‘thank you’ to the team – Shaowen Wang, Anand Padmanabhan, and Becky Vandewalle, as well as to my fellow colleagues for their support and willingness to share and give feedback on our research projects.