Week 3 – Days of Sickness and Discovery

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Hello everyone!

Welcome back to week 3, and I apologize for the late blog post – I was sick but now I’m slowly recovering and should make a full recovery sometime soon.

Regardless, during this time, I was able to meet with a senior faculty member at ASU and I’ll dedicate the latter half of this post to describing why I’m collecting qualitative data.

Firstly, two weeks ago on Thursday, I had the opportunity to meet with Professor B.L Turner, who created the conceptual framework for vulnerability published in PNAS. While the conversation we had wasn’t directly related to this project, it was insightful to see how conversations between PIs and graduate students took place and how ideas were enriched with each other’s expertise. For example, a graduate student asked whether ecological events were associated with the vulnerability of a system, since in traditional transportation analysis, the urban and ecological systems are separate. On the other hand, Prof. Turner comes from an ecological standpoint and states it might be imperative to consider the feedback or interaction between both systems. It was interesting to see the discourse between two separate, yet interrelated fields coming out with a new perspective on our own model.

Coming out of the meeting, it also happened to be a passing period, so I talked to a few GIS students at the Lattie F. Coor Hall. Overall, very insightful experience, and I would have stayed longer if I wasn’t too sick.

Qualitative Data:

As time progresses, I am looking forward to conducting a few surveys with parents and school administrators to understand what exactly their hassles are during school pickup. While I’ve got the overall idea for the simulation ready, I am trying to assess the need for each school to make sure that the simulation can be truly generalizable. I also participated in the IRB meeting, and the survey, after a few minor adjustments, should be out soon. In the next post, I will go more in-depth into this, but for now, this is all I have.

Thank you for tuning in!

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