Samuel Achonu

Goals for Summer 2020

I have two goals for the summer, one is to get good at GIS and R programming, and the other is to get decent job experience. As I try to improve my skills, I also want to improve my work ethic in the long run. Though the rundown of my internship from my peers sounds difficult and like a lot of work, I am ready to put in as much time and effort as possible to meet standards and pursue my goals. This internship will help me tremendously because it forces me to be productive and use my mind creatively outside of academics. It will also give me the experience I need for future jobs and give me a sense of what I want to do later in life.

How Covid-19 changed my summer plans

Usually, my summer plans consist of waking up, eating, browsing the internet, and sleeping. It couldn’t have been better timing that for the one summer that I was looking for an internship, covid-19 came in to change my plans. At first I thought it wouldn’t be possible to actually join an internship, but apparently it would be done virtually.

All in all, I am adapting quite well. It took me a while to get rid of some of my lazy habits, but I’m getting the hang of a decent schedule of doing my work and having fun. On top of all of this, I cannot visit the lab so I have to view it virtually and work miles away. Even though it is another summer of me staying home all day, this has been my most productive summer by far and I am looking forward to the rest of it.

Career Panel Reflection

All the career stories were quite interesting and different from what I thought they would be. The one that stood out to me the most was Kyle Broach’s story. I found it very cool that he was able to do the exact same work of many interns combined by himself in a shorter period of time just by being skilled in programming. It shows that practicing a lot and becoming more experienced really does pay off and it is also inspirational to me since I am going into a similar field. I would like to learn more about how many hours he puts into his work daily and any other pieces of advice to keep up that level of productivity daily. This has definitely changed my outlook on post-graduation. In the past I thought it would be mundane to work daily doing the same thing over and over, but I realized there are many opportunities and challenges, and it all comes down to how determined I am to find them.

Final Reflection

When I applied for the GEOPATHS internship, originally my goals were to gain experience working and see if what I was majoring in was actually of interest to me. I also had a quite linear thinking about working in general before any of this started. Because I’ve never had a job in the field before I thought it would just be boring repetitive work over and over but it was truly a different experience.

Firstly, I learned how to use QGIS and RStudio a lot better than I did from the classes I learned them from. There is a big difference between learning content to ace an exam and learning content to finish an assignment. To do a task, I actually had to learn things I didn’t have the obvious answer to and think for myself more. In my opinion I think that using these programs practically is better for me and more meaningful, though it could get frustrating a lot of the times when I thought there would be no answer.

I used QGIS a lot more than RStudio in my internship so I can say I am more experienced in it. Here is a little bit of what I’ve done with QGIS (see image below)

This shows a bunch of points within multiple watersheds and I was able to take out lots of data from them, like slope, aspect, and curvature. As I mentioned before, there were some frustrations in getting to these points as there were a lot of steps and troubleshooting.

Outside of the work I’ve done within the coding, I also found certain things in the weekly Friday zoom meetings really interesting. I found the things I had to do very difficult at times but possible, whereas when I listened to the guest speaker Kyle Broach it sounded like these things would be very easy to him. He talked about how he got very experienced at his coding and could do what took multiple interns a year in just a matter of months. I found it pretty inspiring that someone could be that good, but understandable because I had only been going at it for less than two months at the time. It also let me know that if I got a lot better at what I can do I could find many more job opportunities and actually be very useful.

All in all, the internship was really good for me, I got the work experience I needed and I also have a different idea of what I want to do now. In my first reflection, I mentioned I wanted experience and connections and I believe that I got both. Though it was virtual, getting experience and using coding programs practically is very important and valuable. I still look forward to working with my co-interns on different projects and I would definitely recommend this internship to anybody who seems interested in getting experience as well. In essence, this was a big step for me and it made my summer very productive and I am grateful to have had the opportunity.

AGU Abstract

My GEOPATHS Internship at the Watershed Hydrology Laboratory at UCSC focused on understanding how watershed properties may be related to the and presence of stream flow. This is important because the presence of stream flow can influence water supply, flood mitigation, agriculture, and other ecosystem services. To address this, we conducted a GIS analyses to quantify critical terrain attributes, such as the area, curvature, and slope of watersheds located in central coastal California. We applied these terrain attributes to a predictive model of stream flow presence to test if previous models can be applied to our study system. This internship has exposed me to what watershed properties influence how stream flow works and how important its role is today. All in all, these studies and experiments will aid in future management of water resources. I will share the results of my project and experiences in the program.