Student Testimonials

Several past GDA students have shared some kind words about their experience in the class, and how it has helped with their dissertation research and/or career. I collected some of these here (with permission). These testimonials are useful for students considering enrollment, and for me to revisit when I’m having a rough day and/or need a little extra motivation :)

“Just a quick note to say hi and an anecdote. Today I rewrote an existing python script at work that previously took about 1 hour to run for a given input. It was manipulating a text file with for loops etc. By using what I learned about Pandas vectorization vs loops I was able to cut the runtime down to less than 30 seconds. That is what I call value added. Thank you!
I have also since made quite good use of Pandas for a few other scripts dealing with hydrology-related timeseries and can’t imagine not having taken the course and having to fumble my way through learning it piecemeal. Thank you again for delivering high value, real-world skills content in an inclusive, innovative learning environment.”
-Chris Meder, CEE PMP M.S. 2020

“This course has truly given me an enormous step up in coding in the civil and environmental engineering field. Before taking the course, I had no idea just how versatile python could be! I credit many of the skills I learned in this class to be the reason why I got my first engineering job. I have even passed on David’s syllabus website to many of my coworkers. I regularly refer to the site myself, even just for inspiration. Especially for the next generation of engineers in our field, a strong knowledge base in geospatial analysis and coding has proven to be incredibly worthwhile.* *Beyond just specific geospatial analysis techniques, this course is an excellent way to learn about the large open-source community available with python. David had us use real world data, and the products of our work were incredibly valuable. This was definitely one of the most motivating courses I had taken at UW, and I would certainly recommend it to all prospective students.”
-Jori Carter, CEE B.S. 2022

“This course introduced me to so many valuable tools and techniques for working with geospatial data that I’ve continued to use. I regularly go back to the course material on GitHub and my old homework assignments for reference, and the final project I did for this class became the foundation for what will become part of my dissertation. The real-world examples presented in the class help to ground some of the complex or abstract methods in practical applications.*
*David’s enthusiasm for exploring science and engineering questions with the latest open-source software tools comes through in his teaching, and the classroom environment was collaborative and fun! I’d recommend this course for anyone working with geospatial data, especially in the Earth and environmental sciences, and anyone interested in Python and open-source software.”
-Steven Pestana, CEE PhD student (GDA winter 2019 student)

“Hey David, I just wanted to say how awesome and important this course was to me and my career. I’ve explained to numerous students since taking this class, I don’t think I could do my current job as a postdoc without this course. The course provided me with an understanding of writing bash scripts, which I use to manage the inputs, configurations, and outputs of various meterological and hydrologic models. In addition, the course opened the python door for me. As a previous matlab user, I’ve learned to love python and how it’s made analyzing and visualizing large amounts of data (TB’s) and many small datasets much easier for me. Thanks for providing real examples but generalized enough that I can reference the assignments when trying to work with similar datasets or performing a similar analysis. For instance, I used the SNOTEL/pandas/geopandas assignment to analyze hydrologic model output against these data. I used the xarray notebooks to analyze meterological and hydrologic data. Using the lazy loading within xarray, I can do many processes much quicker and without loading the entire large file into memory. Furthemore, it’s just much easier to string togehter bash and python scripts to do analyses without having to worry about a license (matlab). Lastly, thank you for staying late after class and for all the additional information over slack to help with any nuanced questions I have. An amazing course!”
-William Ryan Currier, CEE Ph.D. 2020

“I don’t think I’ve touched Matlab for personal research once in the last 2 years, despite being quite resistant to learning a new programming language at the start of your GDA course (“I already know how to do this in Matlab”). I am not alone in feeling this way either — I still collaborate with Ryan Currier frequently and he’s also a full snake-convert. Recently, having knowledge of python has felt like a superpower. Long processing tasks can be easily parallelized, large datasets (~100 GB) can be read and manipulated as if they were a few MB, and georeferencing (after some weeks of struggle) can be done quickly. I would be far less efficient in my research without Python. It is no exaggeration when I say that this class was the most useful I have taken in my entire educational career. The weekly notebooks were long and arduous, but almost exactly mimic problems that I still have to solve in my day-to-day research.”
-Dylan Reynolds, CEE Research M.S. 2019

“I’m a College of Engineering alumnus and in 2022, a couple of years after graduating I worked through the GDA course independently as I started worked with satellite data and making maps more often. I did it over the course of a few months, and the skills I learnt have been incredibly useful, for example in creating fun visualizations like this one. I really appreciate David compiling all of these resources and having them be open access, I’m sure I’ll come back to the website to refer to docs over time!”
-Tushar Khurana, CEE B.S. 2020