How did You get Started in GIS?
Just read a neat article from Directions Magazine. Great article on how someone got a start in GIS, technology and the like with a great internship. This got me thinking about how I got started in GIS.
After finishing undergrad with a geography degree, I found myself woefully underemployed. In 1997, I decided to move to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and pursue GIS, as I thought it would combine the desired technical skills to make myself marketable, as well as my love for maps and travel. Within a couple of months, I had an internship at Natural Resources Canada (now that’s a story!) which had me working on aerial photo selection in the map library to start.
Soon after, I was right in the GIS thick of things, building a GIS database from the ground up and publishing it to the web. The Ground Control Database was my first real project which allowed me to apply the power of GIS, and, in my case, expose me to the world of GIS and the Internet.
So how did you get started in the geospatial / GIS field? I find this interesting because our field brings people from so many disciplines and backgrounds.
Guillaume said,
Wrote on November 8, 2006 @ 05:11:56
I’m coming from IT and DB management field. I was looking for a field of work where I could both satisfy my technical interests and travel desire. I then specialised in RS and GIS. I couldn’t have chosen better. I worked the next two years in Europe (I’m French) and since then, it was 8 years ago, in a lot of different places of the world. I really love my job, and this ever-evolving field of work.
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Alexandre Leroux said,
Wrote on November 8, 2006 @ 17:17:52
Tommy, see this related poll 🙂
Posted fromhttp://slashgeo.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=16&aid=-1
I ended in GIS by sheer luck when a friend told me about some geomatics M.Sc. program. I’m not unhappy. Geospatial is fun! 🙂
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Jason Birch said,
Wrote on November 9, 2006 @ 04:01:15
Just lucky I guess…
I started school wanting to be a high school teacher (what was I, crazy?) and got picked up by a 2nd year geographic methods lab assistant to work part time at his GIS consultancy. Kept that up until school was done and then for a couple years after.
That was some awesome training. Doug was a GIS programming guru, and taught me everything I know about traversing winged-edge topology programatically. Those were the days, hacking PC Arc/Info and Foxpro in the early years, and moving on to Arc/Info and Oracle on a DEC Alpha later on. Not only did I learn my GIS-fu there, but I also got to do hardware, software and network tech support on some wacky systems.
Our milk and butter came from the provincial fisheries effort to create a 1:50k watershed atlas. We wrote a lot of inhouse code to help with the QA and data transfer, which is where the topology stuff came in. One of the smaller projects that I enjoyed was building an AML-based automated plotting system. It allowed the client to choose a page size and map scale, and it would dynamically resize all of the elements (title, map, legend, metadata block) to fit in that area. Sometimes I miss playing around in AML.
In the end I didn’t become a high school teacher, but I married one, which I’m sure is just as good 🙂
Jason
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