This is the map place

 Hey my fellow mapaholics! Hope you enjoyed yourselves since we last met. This week was mostly straightforward, as I've done a lot of geocoding and creating XY data before. At least, that's what I thought until I spent 30 minutes looking at some Asian mountains trying to figure out why I was there. Then, much to my chagrin, I realized I committed one of the silliest mistakes in map-making. I left off the negative sign on my coordinate. Once I got that figured out, getting the correct locations to appear was a breeze. Anyways, go check out the schools I was able to geocode!   School Locations

 Hey everyone, hope your lab went better than mine this week. It was going really well, until I got to the end and didn't have the correct number of features. It had been looking good, I was nearing down on a suitable campsite that didn't fall in the buffer of our water and road features. I had just removed the overlap between the buffer union and the conservation lands, but my end result didn't make sense. See my results below:

 Absolutely nothing some might say. And in many cases, this writer would agree with you. Oftentimes, we're just looking at how things appear on a map. I can project it through a dozen different options and have it all fall close enough to guide professional discussions. But I've never worked as a surveyor or designer, always worked on more big picture projects than close up views. This lab really helped to highlight the small differences that different projections can cause. If you're using GIS to place a manhole or dig up some fiber line, these small differences can quickly equate to millions in lost dollars.

 If this class was a an 80's sports film, this lab would've been the training montage. Really focused on honing our skills and craft and getting those fundamentals down. This type of map is a really clean cut example of a map intended to convey information. For a lot of your government, construction and other fine detail type jobs, you'll see a lot of maps that look like this. They convey the information, a few supporting pieces for follow up questions, and it does so in a clear and concise manner. The UWF campus, what major cities are nearby, what county it's in, etc. All of this is clear from the map below: