Peter Nelson

This is one of my favorite classes I have taken at Middlebury. This is Nelson's area of expertise and it showed though his clear and engaging lectures and assigned readings that worked to reveal a complex geographical history and analysis of America's rural space, land, economy, and social and cultural world. The projects assigned for this course are challenging and time consuming, but require you to dig deeper into the content in rural areas or with rural phenomenon of your choice, which make them very meaningful and rewarding. Nelson's prompts and guidelines for projects allow for you to conduct research as a geographer to be proud of and show off - especially the 10+ page final essay. Another part of the class that I really appreciated was that Nelson brought in local farmers and entrepreneurs and required us to interview local businesses in Middlebury to help us better understand rural economies (and that also helped me feel more connected to Middlebury and VT outside of being a student). The only thing that I did not like about the fall 2025 version of the class was the class partnership with Middlebury BMP. While learning from them was interesting, I did not appreciate being required to create promotional videos for them; it seemed like Nelson was using us to help fulfill some favor that he needed as he hold a position the BMP board himself. Overall though, this course is extremely high value, a gem not only in the geography department but for Midd course offerings in general. Take it!

This is one of my favorite classes I have taken at Middlebury. This is Nelson's area of expertise and it showed though his clear and engaging lectures and assigned readings that worked to reveal a complex geographical history and analysis of America's rural space, land, economy, and social and cultural world. The projects assigned fo …Read more

I am a geography major and a big fan of Nelson, but this course was not his strong suit. For one, I was really hoping to improve my skills of coding in R (I started as an absolute beginner). While I can fairly competently figure out what packages I need, read and understand code that is given to me, and prompt AI for troubleshooting advice, after completing the class with an A-, I am useless at writing any kind of code on my own. That disappoints me. I will say that Nelson's classroom model of giving people code he had already written so modify for their own datasets allowed me to process trends in the data quickly and easily, and that was useful for my understanding of how data wrangling can be really useful in the discipline of geography. Another thing that I did not like was that his lectures about statistics were very vague and hard to follow for someone new to the content. Had I taken AP Stats or some kind of statistics class at Midd I would have done better (although probably also bored in lecture) with understanding what statistical measures I needed to query in R for the questions I wanted to ask with the data. One thing that I liked is that this course pairs well GEOG261, and I enjoyed using data that I pulled from QGIS in R for my projects for this course. Strengths of the class include good feedback on work, good organization of the course with a project check every week and a project due every two weeks, how easy to get support from Nelson (he is very kind and accommodating), and the final project that you get to come up with yourself (allows a lot of creativity and personalization which made it fun to complete).

I am a geography major and a big fan of Nelson, but this course was not his strong suit. For one, I was really hoping to improve my skills of coding in R (I started as an absolute beginner). While I can fairly competently figure out what packages I need, read and understand code that is given to me, and prompt AI for troubleshooting …Read more

Professor Nelson mixes many teaching styles to accommodate to various student preferences. He is very enthusiastic about class material and will make sure to condense or contextualize assigned readings in class. The research assignments help you delve into topics from class in much more depth which I really enjoyed as it gives some flexibility to explore something of your interest while still providing you with some direction.

Professor Nelson mixes many teaching styles to accommodate to various student preferences. He is very enthusiastic about class material and will make sure to condense or contextualize assigned readings in class. The research assignments help you delve into topics from class in much more depth which I really enjoyed as it gives some f …Read more