“Community Plan 2040 is a community-wide vision aimed at making the County a place where everyone thrives.”
Welcome
Welcome to the online summary of how my internship at Esri went during the summer of 2023.
This StoryMaps will not only provide you with context with what I’ve been working on by myself in the past 12 weeks, but also how I’ve interacted with customers and peers to provide services to an undisclosed county in North Carolina and learned how to use new Esri apps, such as Hub, Urban, and even StoryMaps!
You may scroll through the site to read all about my experience or look for the enlarged words, happy reading 🙂
About Me
- Interned at the Charlotte-Waverly Office in North Carolina
- Graduated from the University of Mary Washington in the spring of 2023
- Majored in Geospatial Analysis and minored in Urban Planning
- Only intern at the office this specific summer, had to get creative with my free time
- Crushed it at pickleball and tennis specifically
- Other things I did included binge watching LOST, playing Tears of the Kingdom, and going to the Regal Mystery Movie Mondays
- Avid explorer of Charlotte
- Excited to unpack my summer with you
Defining a Project
When trying to find a solo project to work on for the past summer, my mentor, Carl, and I quickly found out that the biggest issue was the time constraints of 12 weeks.
Originally, we had a different project in mind for what I could end up doing this summer, but after discussing with them we realized that it wouldn’t work out because they wanted to wait until next fiscal year to begin this project, so about halfway through the summer I was stranded with no solo project.
After rightfully panicking for a weekend, Carl helped find a different project for me to do in working with the County’s Tax Office to help digitize their community based feedback on their county growth from a PDF booklet to an ArcGIS Hub site. By having their community based feedback readily available in a single place, members of the area would be able to quickly see what the goals of the County are and how their county will evolve by 2040, allowing for a better sense of interconnectivity.
Working With the County
After meeting with Paul and Lee, the two head GIS professionals of the County, we were able to determine what they were looking for in a Hub site and me as a resource. They were as follows:
- Update their current Hub site to be “less PDF-esque”
- Based their Hub site off of existing ones to make it the best in the country
- Have me teach their staff on how to properly use and update their own Hub sites
Their last goal was especially interesting to both me and the team here at Esri, as I am not allowed to teach anyone because I am extremely unqualified. Because of this, I was able to connect with Curt Quigley, a member of the training team at Esri, and we were able to develop a learning plan for Gaston County’s staff members, allowing for them to learn everything they need to know about a Hub site on their own.
After a couple weeks of researching different Hub sites and trying to make simultaneous edits to the Community Plan 2040 site as Paul and Lee tried to do their own thing, It became clear to Carl, Blake, the account manager on this project, and I that probably the best course of action for me would be to make my own mockup Hub site, allowing for the County to have the option of either taking the one I made or just using it as inspiration towards whatever site they want.
Now let’s look at some of the changes I made and how they compare to the Hub site the County already had and what minor differences I made…
Creating a Sample Hub Site for a Customer
Community Plan 2040 Trade-off
By far the aspect of this project that caused the most headache was figuring out how to transfer the Hub site from one organization to another.
In hindsight I should’ve just made the original Hub site in the organization account that the County created for me but I decided that making it in the SLG Government organization was better. After discussing with Jay in regards to how it’s possible to convert it over, we realized that the best way was for me to save the site as a template then import it to the organization.
As you can see by the gif, the process of importing the site is pretty straightforward when it is saved as a template, which completely bypasses the need for python or sharing to a specific user and giving them permissions to access an organization they are not a part of.
And if you’re wondering… they loved the Hub site and were really grateful about the work I did!
Final Thoughts
It was fine.
I personally enjoyed it, this internship taught me new skills that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned in any other situation and if you asked me if I’d do it again, I’d probably have to consider my response a lot before making a decision.
Any advice I’d have to other interns would be to be prepared to take advantage of being the only one there. I believe that really helped me adjust to the mentality of how entering the workforce will go, not every job will have multiple people starting out at the same time and odds are you’ll be alone and out of your comfort zone, just try to embrace it and have a good time in your new position!
Important Note
Originally this was set up as a StoryMap, but alas you can’t import a StoryMap into WordPress.
If you’d like to get the full experience (and see some before and after slides for the Hub site), click the link below!
Colin Uhry's Portfolio 
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