Visualizing the Growth of GSU

I’m coming into my last year at GSU next semester, and it’s getting tougher by the day. This semester has been extremely busy, and I’m beginning to worry how I am going to manage my life after college. I haven’t been able to put as much effort as I wanted to in the SIF program this year, although I have worked on many things throughout the semester. One of these is the GSU Growth Map, and that is what I would like briefly present in this post.

My time as a SIF this semester has mainly been split into two. One half for 3d Atlanta, and the other half for this project. Now I have already talked about 3d Atlanta, and although I can continue talking about, I’ll continue discussing that in a later post. The issue with this other project was that once the idea was told to us in our initial meeting, we were told that the due date for this project was just about a month. Now, when first explained to us, this project seemed pretty large, and we didn’t really have that many people on our team. The project was at follows: create a StoryMap on ArcGIS that displays every single building that GSU has owned or has acquired since its inception, along with photographs that we have permission to use. To make a long story short, the next few weeks consisted of racing against deadlines and running across campus with a professional camera. Fortunately, we got it completed, and I’m proud of the result contributed by myself and the rest of the team.

I had a different feeling for this project. The reason we had such a short timeline was because the president of GSU had intended to use our StoryMap during his address to the university. Now this was a little intimidating, because although we had a short time, we couldn’t complete the project halfheartedly. Another reason it felt different was because this project would also be used for a campaign to raise money for Georgia State, and there was another group full of professionals they hired to complete a project to aid with this. So there was a small hint of competition in this project.

In the end, the other group’s project is really awesome and blows ours out the water, but as I mentioned before, I’m proud of the work my fellow SIFs and I accomplished in such a short amount of time. If you haven’t seen it, the incorporation of our projects can be viewed here.

Thanks for reading,

Shakib