5/10/2025
This semester has been both a great challenge and great learning experience for me, not just in my position with Vivero, but in my position as a student as well. I’ve learned so, so much about time management, discipline, and knowing when and where to give myself grace. This semester was a bit of a perfect storm of incidents for me—between family health matters, personal health issues, difficult classes, and people important to me being far away, I struggled a lot with aspects of college that I’ve not struggled with in the past. I think the most important thing I’ve learned this semester is how important it is to be a bit more patient with myself while also holding myself to the small things that are tedious, but make life better. If I could give some advice to myself at the beginning of the semester, I’d remind myself that sometimes being good to myself and lessening stress later means doing something that I find hard to do now, but equally, that the hard thing shouldn’t be unrealistic. Holding myself to standards that are unreasonably high, is not going to help me do good work, particularly in work settings.
As for the training model of Vivero, I actually really enjoyed it. I struggled sometimes to keep up the pace throughout the semester when certain weeks got harder than others, but all in all, the consistent learning and training was actually pretty fun. I was always working on something new and I enjoyed that, though I may have needed a break sometimes. There was very little that I found confusing or unhelpful—everything was well documented and easy to follow along with. Training was genuinely fun!
As for my next steps in project work next semester, I’ve detailed a lot of my plans and the ideas we’ve floated around this semester in a large documentation file. It details most of the work I’ve done this semester, answers to questions that I struggled with but ultimately solved while working, an overview of the project as a whole, and where I think the project could go from here based off of my conversations with my project leader. That file is saved in my project’s storage files and hopefully will be of use to myself or someone else later.
I think for next year I’m most excited to continue doing project work and more advanced trainings for some of the programs we have already looked at. For things I’ve already worked on, I really want to improve my understanding of WordPress, and also ARCGis, but there’s also so many more programs that I’m excited to dip my time into!
That’s all for now! Until next semester…