A Lesson in Illinois Geography
My first assignment as a research assistant was to tackle a spreadsheet full of a different foreign worker visas issued in Illinois. The aim was to filter out all of the entries that were not in the counties we cover in central Illinois for part of the Vulnerability Assessment that the lab is doing for our Department of Justice grant. This was an interesting task for me to take on because prior to doing it, my knowledge of Illinois geography was pretty much limited to the Macon County and Chicago areas. So even though a lot of what I was doing was just reading the name of towns, looking up the counties these towns were in, and then checking the map of the counties we cover, I still found it to be useful and engaging. Now it’s kind of nice hearing the name of a city in Illinois and actually having a general idea of where it is. My actual findings when applied to realm of foreign workers were fairly interesting. The first sheet, which covered agricultural foreign workers, and the third