So I realize I haven't actually mentioned the reason I'm actually in Mexico yet. The concept of my work is really interesting, but it is coming along at a snail's pace. But at this point, I have produced something I am quite proud of, and so hopefully it will all work out!
I am working in the Institute of Engineering at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City. My project is to develop a model to assess the relative vulnerability of the different neighborhoods in Mexico City to climate change. Basically that means I did a lot of reading (in English and Spanish) and now am playing around with MATLAB to be followed by a fair amount of writing.
It has been a bit frustrating so far because Mexicans seem to work on a bit of a different time table, so I have been waiting almost 2 weeks for comments on a two page list of vulnerability indicators I sent to my supervisor and the other woman working on the project. I finally received a reply, but still have no real data.
I have been working on writing the MATLAB code in order to do the vulnerability ranking. Although we learned MATLAB in 1.020 last semester, most of our projects were pretty guided by the examples we did in class. This is the first time I have really had to produce my own code from scratch, and not have anyone to help me debug it. It was a bit daunting at first, but I have learned that if I just think it through, I can figure out where the problem lies.
That is about 1/3 of my code I have so far, nicely commented, and fully functional (at least with a table full of zeros...). Hopefully it will work when I get real data as well, but so far, I've managed to debug it by myself. There's no telling when I will actually be getting the data I need, but I'm pretty happy with what I have been able to do so far, and the fact that it works.
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