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dragontoes

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About dragontoes

  • Birthday 07/23/1986

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  • Gender
    Female
  • Location
    Washington DC
  • Interests
    Transitioning from GIS research to Transportation Economics. Lurking and learning in the econ sub-forum for now.
  • Application Season
    2015 Fall

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  1. I went to graduate school in UMD-CP and still work in the area. I lived at grad hills while I was at school because I didn't have a car and because at the time I was working two jobs on campus and needed a short commute. We had several break-ins in grad hills while I was there, as well as muggings. If you don't have a car, the shuttle and metro system are stellar and you will do just fine, but I used to try and get myself home before midnight because ... see previous sentence. I had the honor of being there for the one-homicide-a-day streak. Yes it is less safe than other neighborhoods in the area, but name one urban(ish) university town that is 'safe'. The nature of housing around universities tends to run on the cheap end, which tends to attract residents of lower socio-economic and transient backgrounds. Lower household earnings are correlated with (not causal of) higher crime rates. My tongue in cheek advice would be that, in general, the closer you are to Langley Park, the earlier you should try to get home. Hyattsville has recently undergone a rejuvenation of sorts and is actually quite nice (in a transposed yuppy townhouses sort of way). All of that being said, as soon as I got a car, I moved to Silver Spring and absolutely love it here. My reasons are as follows: - No more college students - Nicer amenities in apartments with landlords being more responsive because it's not a college town where they can find 50 other people to replace you in a heartbeat - Fantastic downtown area - Always in the opposite flow on traffic on the beltway - Free shuttle to campus - New library and new transit center under construction - Red line trains run every 2-4 minutes going into the DC in the morning (you have to go into DC to switch over to the green line into CP) - Residents tend to be young and many of them go to UMD so finding roommates in the same boat as you shouldn't be a problem - 16th st buses drop you 1 block away from the white house (straight shot down) - Big real estate boom just before the bubble burst means you can now rent homes that were supposed to sell as luxury condos for relatively cheap - I have parking and don't have to worry about street parking Downsides to silver spring: - The apartments tend to have higher income requirement thresholds, so if you are 2-3 students with no/bad credit and GA/TAships, you may not get approved - Our apartment's waiting list was 3 months (I think that was because we moved in just before fall semester started) - A bit pricier - Foot traffic around the discovery building can be rage inducing during rush hour - Red line on the weekends consistently SUCKS - Georgia Avenue traffic - Speed cameras - Not a lot of late night attractions (I know of two bars) Hope this helps!
  2. I'm looking to go into transportation policy/economics in the next few years and would absolutely LOVE to hear what you have learned 3 years on from this post. Whatever you can share will be enormously helpful.
  3. I'm late to party seeing as you're already in a program, but you sound like you would have been a solid candidate for UMD-CP. The department is big on remote sensing/LU-LC change and have a very close relationship with NASA.
  4. If you're still looking for an answer (1+ year after the fact), I would recommend contacting some graduate programs. Somewhere there is a student willing to do this for free probably. Look for programs that reinforce web programming or mobile programming.
  5. Don't worry about it, everything you need to know will be taught in spatial statistics. That being said, worry about it before you start publishing papers because if you are using GeoDa or the Spatial Analyst extension and spitting out data with no foresight or understanding of your models, you will be laughed out of published works. In essence: to get in to grad school, it's not a big deal. To make it outside of grad school, it can be a big deal.
  6. A bad one? One not made by a cartographer? I would actually consider this an infographic overlaid on a map given the administrative inconsistencies of where the place-markers are dropped. Don't even get me started on mercator.
  7. IMHO online degrees tend to be of consequence for people who are already more or less in the job/industry they want to be in and want to ameliorate their skills to include more technical/analytical skills. That being said, I don't know how helpful these degrees are to someone who does not already have their food in the door. I am a GIS researcher and went to a program that gave us the options of taking online or on campus classes, and chose the on-campus option. Being on-campus granted me two opportunities: 1. access to graduate assistantships and 2. access to research, which inevitably got me the job I have now. I understand that these degrees are sometimes the only options some people have (such as in the example DavePark gave), but if you are not already in the field, I recommend an in-person degree that would allow you access to the professors and possibly grant you the potential of LORs.
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