Internship Blog Post #1

 

Internship

Blog post 1

In this blog post I'll briefly describe some of the course steps I've taken to make progress to my professional resume and outreach to a local GIS user group. 

Thoughts & Overview

    These steps have helped me realize just how far I've come since beginning my career in Geographic Information Science and how much help there for people just starting out. As you know, GIS can be a very complex science as it requires so much knowledge in geography, geospatial processes, coordinate systems, etc.. the list goes on and on. 

    However, GIS has so many niche sciences that while you may not be great in one specific area, you can become great in others depending on your position and what sort of work your career has you focused on. 

    For me, my focus is in utility mapping and primarily working with large attribute tables and vector data. While I may rarely implement raster data and arial imagery in my position, there may come a day that I find a career that heavily relies on rasters or could possible find myself using it for a project in my current role. 

    In this part of the internship I created a new resume outlining all of my education and experience in GIS thus far. Prior to beginning this certificate program I had no clue how much hard science GIS really does. Today however, I have a much more well rounded knowledge of all the possibilities that a career in this field of science has to offer. 

    In my resume I realized how much of my surveying and drafting background has helped me in already gearing my mind towards geospatial data and included it as a part of my work history and educational background.  

  

Task 1

I'll shortly explain my plan for earning credit during this internship course. 

    After speaking with the course coordinator Dr. Bloechle, I will be working on creating a new schedule for exercising my companies system water main valves to replace the current system. 

    As a public water system, we are required to exercise valves on a schedule determined by the governing bodies in order to assure that they do not seize and to prevent them from operating as they should. Main line valves are a very important asset to any water company because they determine the ability to shut off flow to portions of the system in case of a main line failure due to either active or passive causes. 

Even lightning strikes have cause our mains to break in the past as tree roots and objects in the ground that are in close proximity to our mains and services can guide lighting right to them. 

    My project is sort of two fold as I will also have to implement this process into another program that we use called Cityworks, which responsible for most of the companies daily work flow. 

My first steps will include analyzing the existing feature class that contains all of the valves themselves, data, and symbology. Once I determine the attribute fields that contain redundant or irrelevant information I will replace them with fields that will be necessary to move forward. 
This part could be summed up as a sort of (data cleanup). 

The next step will be to restructure the symbology based on a new field that will be added to either reflect the last recorded exercise date or valve type (as we have different types of valves in use). 

The third step will be to republish the map from our SQL server and to update the Enterprise map for the new fields so that they will show up in the attribute tables. 

The fourth step will be to create a new work order or inspection for the valve assets in Cityworks and to establish all of the asset mapping information "on asset add" and on "work order close". All of our work orders and inspections are created from a specific asset and the information in the asset will pre-populate into the work order fields where needed and that has to be manually done. I will also establish settings in the work orders that will automatically generate new work orders based on a timed schedule and schedule them for 1-3 years in the future for their next due date. 

The fifth step is to auto set the planned work order start and finish dates so that they can be organized into advanced queries that the tables will ultimately be based on. 

Lastly, I will create new dashboards and tables that are accessible by the system's employees so that multiple departments can access the information and start exercising.. no pun intended. 

As the work orders are filled out and closed, they will drop off the list.

  The second task we were given was to search for a GIS user group that we'd join and to describe it's purpose and characteristics. 

    The user group I found was called the Northwest Florida GIS User's Group and is about as local as it gets. Compared to the others, it doesn't seem to be a 501c3 organization but rather a Facebook oriented community of GIS users in the local area. One of their more recent meetings took place in Destin which is only about an hour from where I work. I like the fact that the members of the group are so close by as they would have very similar experiences working in this region of the state and country that I do.