Lab 4 - ArcMap

     For this lab, I had to follow a tutorial on how to create an ArcMap. The tutorial was easy to follow, each step was very detailed so it was not too difficult to complete this assignment. Also, it was a long tutorial so it was hard to complete the whole tutorial all at once. Since I am new to this, I was afraid of making a mistake and having to complete the tutorial all over again from the beginning after already spending a lot of time on it. It was a bit hard to locate all the tools that were necessary for this lab, since the lab computers had a newer version of the program, some of the tools were a bit different than described on the tutorial.
     Even though the tutorial for the ArcMap was easy to follow, it does not mean that it would be easy to understand all the materials covered. To be honest, I just followed the steps, but I had no clue what each step was about until I read it over again after I finished the tutorial. I do not think I would be able to remember all these steps if I had to redo this map without the tutorial. The beginning of the tutorial was still understandable, but as I got farther and farther through the tutorial I was kind of lost about what I was doing to the map.
     About half way through I encountered a problem with my map, I was having trouble with adding data to one of the attribute tables. The tutorial wanted to join the data of two different attribute tables and also create a new column within the joined attribute table and input an equation into the field calculator to fill in the column. I did exactly what the tutorial said, but the data did not show up for the population density field. This then messed up my map for the following steps because it required the data that was supposed to be inputted from the previous step, which would not show up on my attribute table.
     Since this lab took a lot more time, it was difficult finding the software to complete this with. Luckily, there was remote access available to students during after hours. But it was a pain trying to work using the remote access. It was really slow and it would not seem to load anything that was on my flash drive. So I had to move my folders into one of the folders on that computer, which took more time, and that got it to work but it was still slow.