Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Done...?

It's done. Finally.  Finished.  The finale.  Complete.

There it is....


What you see there is my Final Project. Officially, it is the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Naval Air Station - Grosse Ile.  The title?  Runways to Recognition.  Huh? Huh? Pretty witty, eh?

As the "Final Project" suggests, it was the final step of my three-year journey to earn a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Eastern Michigan University.  I even managed to graduate with honors.

Of course, with documentation that includes histories, photos and written descriptions of over 30 buildings on a 600+ acre piece of property, any documentation that is worth of a damn is going to be a few pages long, right?  I added the  bottle cap to give scale. (Who would have thought that a bottle cap would be laying around the house. Crazy.) It clocks in at about 7/8" thick.  

 





That journey was quite awesome, if I can say so myself.  Sure, I went to Ypsilanti scores of times over that period. But I also managed Traverse City for a few classes and that awesome road trip to Wheeling, West Virginia is one for the ages.  

My plan?  Well, for now, I'm going to relax just a bit and try to catch up on some things I have been putting off.  I also need to investigate the details behind that one extra class.

Yeah, you read that right.  One more class.  

One of the courses for my degree was an introduction to Geographic Information Systems.  Basically, you input incredible data into incredible software and get incredible maps allowing for incredible analysis.  My project for the class involved a study of cemeteries in Wayne County, Michigan that are susceptible to flooding.   I found the class to be simply incredible. 

The class I am looking to take this fall is essentially a Part 2 as the first section only covered half of the data options (Vector vs. Raster for those of you who know the difference.)

"Why?" you ask?

Because I want to...

So, when I mentioned a moment ago that I was done, welllllll, sort of. I guess I was done with my Final Project and Degree. 

But, hey, there is more learning to be done!