Geography

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

Take this class!!! I was nervous to take GEOG 261 but I ended with a high sense of achievement and confidence. After taking this class I am very excited about the opportunities at Midd and in beyond in geospatial work. Here is what I liked: 1) Professor Holler is organized, kind, accommodating, and extremely skilled and passionate about the subject and pedology of this class. His lectures were engaging and introduced me to interesting and current geospatial work in that I get to nerd out on. 2) The course has a full time employee to aid the class. Ola explains and troubleshoots concepts clearly and kindly. I cannot express how much of an asset she was to the course. 3) There are nightly TA hours, so if you are slow at getting the content, there is always help that is worth your time to get. 4) You really learn the concepts through the assigned videos, practice in lab, and projects. The progressive way the course is taught helps you continuously practice what you learn all the way up until the end. 5) Making workflows is creative and fun. Having this problem-solving as required independent work in the course was challenging but rewarding. 6) The exams were challenging, but not unfairly. They required you to really learn the content, which I appreciated. They were paper exams with open notes to your course manual (aka all of the answers if you have developed critical thinking about how to use GIS tools throughout the course). The grading was fair and Holler is good at honoring academic accommodations. Here is what I didn't like: 1) This course does not use Canvas. While I liked the course website, I disliked Gradescope for viewing the results of my exams because is was hard to tell where I got points off. 2) There is a weekly quiz on content from the online lectures at the start of each week. I would have done better on these quizzes had they been assigned at the end of the week when I had time to ask questions and re-learn content presented in the videos in lecture and lab.

Take this class!!! I was nervous to take GEOG 261 but I ended with a high sense of achievement and confidence. After taking this class I am very excited about the opportunities at Midd and in beyond in geospatial work. Here is what I liked: 1) Professor Holler is organized, kind, accommodating, and extremely skilled and passionate ab …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