Times have definitely changed
Written By Sara Peluso, 2018 REU Alumna
I currently work at Esri as a Technical Support Analyst, something that my mom always laughs about given that growing I was the most impatient child, immediately giving up on every hobby and sport when I ran into a challenge that I could not immediately figure out.
Times have definitely changed- I now find it exciting when I run into problems because I know that I can fix them, even if I don’t know the answer immediately. I credit this growth to my time working with Citizen Science GIS, where I was forced to work through problems that I would normally give up on.
The Citizen Science GIS REU was my first exposure to field work- I had the opportunity to design a research project from scratch with four other students. It was daunting, I was planning on collecting data with apps I had never used, in a country I had never been to, with people that I didn’t know, using analysis workflows I was not familiar with. My younger self would have backed out immediately. Despite wanting to give up after the first error message presented when creating my geodatabase, I was pushed to keep going. Eventually, using the apps became like second nature, there were less and less error messages presented, and I was able to familiarize myself with the workflows to the point where I felt comfortable explaining my process to other GIS whizzes at three conferences. Its tacky, but the moral of the story is to not give up. Since joining the Citizen Science GIS team in 2017 I’ve had the fortune to work on various mapping projects with different environmental impacts (like helping to map green buildings with the City of Orlando to analyzing how a newly paved road would impact flood patterns in a coastal community in Belize), but now I’m at a point where I’m helping others finish their projects. People call Esri Support Services every day, some on the verge of giving up, I get to pick up the phone push them to keep going.
Sara and Giselle collecting data in the field in Hopkins, Belize.