Benjamin P. Stewart

Welcome to GIS in grad school.

This site represents the sum of my work in grad school. The purpose is to disseminate my knowledge developed here and to comment on the applicability and usefulness of GIS in graduate school.

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

My final semester has started (hopefully my final semester). Last semester was not as productive as I would have liked, but I got my first paper finished, so that leaves the second paper for this semester. I participated in a search for a new Geography faculty member last semester, and while it was a rewarding, and unique experience, it was too much work.

So this semester is dedicated to my thesis. Despite this goal, I have already done some work for a few friends. Two friends needed help with graphing in R (surprisingly similar questions, actually), and another colleague and I are working on a tool for a paper of his. Check out the downloads section for more information

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

A comment on the end of my first year seems appropriate, as I have a fair amount of free time right now. My first year seems like it was a combination of a number of different years. My first semester was dedicated to school work, with all of my courses occuring in this semester:

The lack of significant course work is one reason why I chose the University of Victoria. I have done a BSc, as well as a diploma in GIS, and I wasn't eager to come to Grad School to perform standard course work.
The courses themselves were all right; as a non-geographer, any introduction to geography is new and interesting to me.
TAing was an intersting experience...I taught the labs for GEOG 328 and GEOG 329, both standard GIS courses. I wonder how many other TAs have wondered the same thing I did: "Was I this thick in undergrad?" Not to deride the students, but I just wonder if my undergrad TAs were as confused by my work as I was by my students'.

Second semester saw a return to the research assistant lifestyle I had the previous year...kind of. I was still TAing one course and taking another (but that was only a half-course). The research life was pretty easy, probably too easy in fact. While I say that this was a return to the RA lifestyle, that isn't exactly true. As an RA my work was driven by my then boss and now committee member Mike Wulder. Mike would tell me what to do, I would do it, then he would tell me what was right, what was wrong, and we would go through the same procedure. In essence, Mike ran my work, which worked well, in fact we got two publications out of it.

However, the grad school workstyle involves a little bit more self-direction/creativity, and I think that is what I have struggled with the most. Taking my research, and determining a question and method has been very difficult for me, as my inclination is to just start analysis (e.g. data investigation, writing code) instead of taking time to determine the proper direction.

The summer was mostly a waste as far as school went. I was on vacation for about 2 months, and returned to Victoria with both my supervisors absent. So I have been going slowly through my paper and dat and trying to figure out how to synthesize my results into something scientifically legible. Writing and science are hard, but I guess it is working