About Me
When I was a kid I wanted to be a “mad scientist” when I grew up. When I first learned about quantum mechanics, it was like nothing I’d ever heard before – definitely the maddest of sciences. So when I went off to college at George Mason University, I decided to major in physics. I soon discovered that physics was too dependent on my least favorite subject: math, for me to get very far. I did ok up to Calculus III but then I hit a wall.
So I switched to Earth Systems Science. I was hiking down the Grand Canyon and digging up fossils and thinking life couldn’t get any better, until I decided to sign up for “Intro to GIS” as an elective. In my spare time I had always loved playing on computers, and now I was being given class assignments that told me to sit in the GIS lab and play with what seemed like the funnest game that had yet been invented. I just loved being able to crunch the data to tell a story, and making maps that look great doing it.
I stayed in that computer lab at GMU until I had a Master’s degree. I spent my time looking at aerial photographs to measure changes in land-cover alongside streams that drain into the Chesapeake Bay. (It is important to monitor this because vegetation along the banks helps keeps toxins out of the water.) I compared the changes I saw in the aerial photographs to changes in vegetation indices derived from satellite data. I wanted to see if the vegetation index could be reliably used to get the same answers with much less manual labor.
After that, I graduated and got my first real job creating maps of flood zones for a FEMA contractor. The fancy labeling work was pretty fun. Going down to FEMA headquarters during hurricanes to make maps that assisted relief efforts was very exciting. But tracing lines off of paper flood rate insurance maps to create digital versions (DFIRMS) all day long was not. I lasted about a year.
Then I joined a small GIS team at an engineering & construction company. Within a couple months of my arrival our leader left, and a couple months after that my one other teammate left. I was left alone as the sole GIS person at that location. I felt scared taking on that much responsibility, but it turned in to the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I was the “go-to” person for every project that required a map or any sort of geospatial analysis, I learned about every aspect of the ArcGIS suite and how to apply its capabilities to a wide variety of topics. There was no one around to ask when I ran into problems, so I had to figure them out myself. I also had to be able to explain the technology to anyone who came to me with questions. The majority of the material for this blog comes from those years.
The company eventually decided to relocate that branch a non-commutable distance away from me, so I had to move on. My job duties are much more specialized now. Instead of a GIS generalist, I’m all about collecting geospatial data, organizing it into a library structure, and writing metadata for it that conforms to strict standards. I’ve picked up a little Python there, and a little VB.NET from taking some courses. That’s given me a taste for programming, which I may pursue in the future if I get the opportunity. But for now, I write these how-to articles both to share with others the broad expertise I gleaned in the past, and to keep it alive for myself.
February 4th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
I accidentally stumbled upon your website blog… THANK YOU! I love your postings! I am fairly new with GIS applications and am attempting the self-study approach through trial and error. Your how-to articles are a godsend! I have bookmarked your site and definitely will be a frequent visitor!