getting my feet wet

Yesterday I went with my friend Jeevan (from TCU) to find my place of work. We left after classes and it took a while even though the workplace is fairly close to my apartment. It took us around 2.5 hours to find it. It took me 40 minutes to get there this morning. Jeevan and I took so long because of Melbourne’s complicated public transportation system. You have to use the trams, buses, and sometimes trains to get around and it’s not necessarily easy for someone who typically relies on a car to get around here. Nevertheless, we found it and I probably couldn’t have done it without Jeevan who was very patient.

I arrived at work this morning around 11AM and finished at 5:30PM. An employee named Simon put me up to a GIS project planning a residential community for a rural section of land south of Melbourne called East Cranbourne. This is supposed to take me a couple of days but basically I am in charge of planning and subdividing parcels of land for a new suburb that a client wants to develop. The catch…I know nothing about residential planning! To make it worse, the staff thinks I am some type of GIS guru even though I’ve only taken one class in GIS. Lucky for me, not many of them know how to operate GIS. I decided to make a rough sketch of a plan on some tracing paper. This meant I traced already existing suburbs on a map over the parcels of land I’m supposed to develop. Not much but it’s a start. Another guy asked me if I could help him with creating a new tram route for him. This is more what I’m use to since I recently did a GIS project dealing with locating streetcar routes for Fort Worth. Still, I’m really nervous about what they expect of me but at least I’m getting work!

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