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Brandon: I guess I wish I had known the difficulties
in forming individual data sets based on information that's kind of all over the place. So, for
example, in my econometrics class last year, I did a study on ski resorts, and I figured
that, you know, having the annual visitors would be published pretty freely. But in fact,
it's proprietary information, or stuff like that. So I was getting kind of ... I was getting
data numbers from different years, trying to piece them together, and so... I don't
know, learning to understand what is out there, what people are willing to publish is definitely
an important piece of knowledge. I would say that understanding what is there before you
begin your actual research - or having a conception of what could be there before your research
- is very valuable, so you don't kinda go on a wild goose chase and end up with information
that is not really helpful. But, as far as things that I didn't know about research,
I mean, there are just inherent difficulties that you're going to encounter with any research
project. Finding data, finding information that is completely relevant, um, like maps,
data layers. GIS is something that I had to learn how to use. It was present in a number
of research papers that I cited in my literature section, and I was hoping that they would
have published the data somewhere, but in the end, I had to go through, learn how to
use some GIS techniques and basically make my own dataset. So, yeah, don't - I mean,
it's good to be ambitious, but don't bite off more than you can chew, I would say. Have
a reasonable expectation of what's out there and what you can do.