GIS; a learning process

This semester I have been doing some GIS work for the Cuba project. One step in the project is to find all the gauge stations in Cuba by using different maps, satellite images and tables/graphs from papers. My first step was to download and order some of the declassified satellite images from USGS. With these as well as some maps that Mae Kate found in the UVM digital map archive, I was able to use a tool called rubber-sheeting to create more comprehensive and complete maps. To rubber sheet I took a shapefile of Cuba which included roads and used it as reference to geo-reference the road maps from UVM. I did a similar process with the declass images. However, they unfortunately did not cover as much surface area as was projected on the USGS site. I also used these images to start creating land cover data for the satellite images, which involves creating polygons for a group of pixels on the images and classifying them as either urban, pasture, forest or water. I wanted to create a specific LULC system but the images were not clear enough to distinguish between for example, residential and commercial infrastructure.
This semester was truly an exploration in GIS (but this time, without a detailed description of the steps and process to create a certain map, which is what I had last semester in Amanda's class). I learned the wonders of Google, GIS forums and earned an even greater appreciation for the portfolio I made for Amanda's class (and my mom for the many times I FaceTimed her for advice). I'm now graduating but I hope to continue to do GIS work at some point in the future!