Date: May 3rd, 2023
Location: State College, PA
This week has been beyond busy for me. I’ve been dealing with the semester finishing up, finals, and so much more. In fact, I’m moving out of my dorm today! And with the flight for this trip being just three days later (located in a very busy airport in a very busy town that’s a full state over from where I live), it’s safe to say that I have a lot to do and very little time to do it. But I’m hanging in there so here’s a brief little update to some of the latest assignments I had assigned prepared for this trip and a few of the questions I had to think about when writing this journal entry.
These past couple of weeks I took two LinkedIn Learning courses. The first one was about the coding language Python. I had heard and seen a great deal of Python because of some of my friends and just how popular it is as a language but I think that was my first time actually learning and using Python in a more formal setting. For the most part, it was pretty easy to follow along. I don’t do much programming at all but some of the basic stuff was very intuitive. Though I imagine if I were to use Python again for a project, I would very much need a refresher on that course and a guidebook open at all times. Coding languages don’t seem to be my forte because once things start getting just the slightest bit complex, I start to forget all the formatting and command names in a snap. Despite this, it did feel like the learning curve for this language wasn’t something ridiculously high and impossible to fully understand. I just think I need a little (or a lot) more practice in the future.
The second course I had to take was about the coding language R. I actually have some prior experience with R the introduction felt extremely, extremely familiar to me. Last summer I had a project where I had to input a lot of data in R to create graphs about changes in air pollutant concentration in the Mid-Atlantic region. While I had a mentor who tried to teach me R, I ended up spending a lot of time alone teaching myself the basics of the program so I could actually follow along. Though this course went way more into depth so I have a very similar feeling about R and Python. They both don’t feel impossible to learn but I know that it’ll be a challenge when you start getting to a complicated project. A challenge that I know I’ll face with a cheat sheet if I can, haha!
But I know I’ll get a lot of use out of these languages no matter what in the future. Coding is an increasingly popular and in-demand skill so you start to see it pop up with all sorts of jobs. I’ve already used R for a research project related to climate because it’s a great language to help visualize your data, so I know that’s definitely going to come in handy. But Python is a great skill to have in general because it’s so versatile and it can be used in different programs I already use at school like ArcGIS Pro.
But yeah, that’s it for me! Another short journal entry but don’t worry! I’m only a couple of days out from my trip. And by then, I know I’ll have a to say about what I’m doing, seeing, eating, experiencing, and more! So, I’ll see you next time! Thanks for reading!
- DD
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