Author: Bryan R. Vallejo (@BryanRVallejo)
I remember one day when I was carrying out research about the accessibility of elderly population in the context of the steep streets of the historical center of Quito, Ecuador. I found an outstanding paper related to accessibility modelling as a function of time. Since then, I started reading papers written by the members of the Digital Geography Lab (DGL) and my curiosity about their work in geography got awaken. I hoped that one day I will be able to learn from them and gain understanding how to examine our society through digital data and novel tools. Surprisingly, after a year and a half, I am a former visitor of DGL, and I can truly say that this experience was life changing!
Thanks to the University of Tartu, I got the opportunity to be an exchange student during my master studies in geoinformatics. I wanted to learn geospatial analysis and Python programming, and advance my skills in the well-known Python courses given by the members of DGL. The courses taken at the University of Helsinki were an excellent match, and fortunately, I was able to use my new coding skills when joining DGL as a trainee in the BORDERSPACE project under the supervision of Olle Järv.