How I Learned to Love GIS
"I fell into GIS in 1990 after working for a number of years doing manual cartography. When I started my career, FEMA flood maps were made using engraving, type stickup, and color separation. I was an art major in college and had focused on printmaking, so I knew about engraving and color separation, and I liked the hands-on aspects of manual cartography. In the late 1980s, I first worked with a home-grown GIS system that was being used to digitize and code data for the Department of Defense. When I came to Dewberry in 1988, MicroStation and AutoCAD were in use in our department, but many of the FEMA maps were still being made manually. At that time, though, FEMA was starting to develop its standards for digital mapping products and thinking about how to better deliver information about flood hazards. In 1990, Dewberry purchased its first two licenses of ARC/INFO, and I was one of the lucky ones who got trained on it—I was hooked. It's amazing how much the technology has changed and how much data are now widely available, especially compared to those early days!" -Sue Hoegberg
How my 30+ Year Career in GIS Began
"I was working as an environmental consultant at Georgia Tech and during my time there I was exposed to GIS technology through a couple of projects. One of those projects was a study to analyze different sites for a potential reservoir in northern Georgia. More specifically we were analyzing the amount of wetlands that would be displaced from each of the potential sites. After a week into the project I was hooked. I went home one night and announced, "I want to do this for a living"…and I have for the past 30+ years!" -Phil Thiel
Swapping Careers
"When I was choosing a career in high school, I would never have imagined that I would become a geographer. My undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland is in atmospheric and oceanic science (AOSC). I loved both studying the weather and applying math and physics problems to real life applications. In the AOSC department, I worked closely with a professor for my entire undergraduate career, my project was to study the surface energy budget and how it differed between climate regimes. One really cool aspect of the project was coding and mapping different climates across the country. I had two other internships as an undergrad where I worked closely with another professor to map every lake in the world greater than 50 square kilometers. In my other internship at NOAA in College Park, I was tasked to map the Madden-Julian Oscillation. I did a project on this oscillation to determine its impact on hurricane formation. As you can see, mapping became a focus of every project, however, I didn't have any GIS experience until spring semester of my senior year when I took my first ArcGIS class. I enjoyed the class so much that I switched career goals. I am now working towards a masters in the subject and gaining work experience at Dewberry." -Kate O'Brien
A GIS Wave
"Back in 2003, we lost the national contract when FEMA decided to reduce down to a single contractor. The feedback we received was that our business processes were not keeping up with the industry. Paper markups, CAD tools, and multiple manual QC steps were approaches that had served us so well for so long, but the industry was changing. Fast forward one year—through the dedication, commitment, and hard work from so many people, we were now sporting dual monitor GIS on every desktop and planning for our first 200TB datacenter with Citrix remote access. This was made possible through the world's first Esri enterprise license agreement. We were innovating our own homegrown GeoFIRM engineering and mapping toolset. We focused on GIS data and driving products from it. All of this set us on course for winning all the FEMA regional IDIQs we went after, multiple Esri business partner and GeoFIRM awards; and we recaptured the national contract when it came around the next time! I was fortunate to be part of that early GIS wave that truly revolutionized our company." -Ken Logsdon Jr.
An Exciting, Ever-Changing Industry
"I went to college for marine science, biology, and environmental science, but took a GIS course my senior year. The professor I had at the time, Dr. Evan Chirporas, was diagnosed with cancer during the duration of the class, and we had another professor fill in, Dr. Al Karlin with the Southwest Florida Water Management District. This was a hard transition for all of us in the class because of the situation, but Al did a very good job—both he and the situation at hand inspired me to go into a career in GIS after graduation. Since I have started at Dewberry, I've had several great opportunities that have driven my passion for the field. I was able to go to Louisiana last year to help FEMA with the flooding, which was beyond rewarding, and when I knew I picked the right career. I then was a sensor operator for our first two in-house acquisition projects, Hillsborough and the Everglades National Park. Being able to collect lidar data on all of Everglades National Park was a very gratifying experience, because it reminded me of why I am in this field. I have learned a great deal about lidar since I started here and plan to learn even more. The one thing I love about GIS is that there is always something new and exciting to learn, and the technology is always advancing." -Erin Meadows
The First Modern GIS
"I first heard of GIS in 1982 when I became the inspector general of the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA)—now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. DMA was already using "digital carto" procedures to hand-digitize line and point features. AutoCAD was released in 1982 as a desktop application running on microcomputers with internal graphics controllers, but DMA also had needs for these geographic features to be more intelligent for geospatial analyses. In 1982, Larry Ayers, the DMA technical director, introduced the DMA leadership to Esri's first version of ARC/INFO which claimed to be the first modern GIS. The name referred to its architecture as a geographic information system composed of two parts:
- Geographic input, processing and output tools (ARC)
- A complementary but separate database (INFO)
I never personally used GIS software, but while serving as director of the Defense Mapping School (DMS), I was instrumental in revising Army doctrine for topographic engineer units to support combat units with multiple forms of terrain analyses, and while serving as director of the U.S. Army Engineer Topographic Laboratories and U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC), in developing GIS-based systems now widely used by Army terrain analysts and the commercial industry." -Dave Maune
How GIS Found Me: Mapping my Journey into the World of GIS
"I first discovered GIS—or maybe I should say it first discovered me—during my second year of college at BYU. I started school going in the direction of a physics major because of my interest in climate and weather (there was not a specific degree for meteorology offered there at the time). As I progressed down that path, I found the classes to be less and less interesting, and increasingly difficult. Time passed and during my second year as an undergraduate, I was talking with a friend who was a GIS major and he suggested that I try taking the Intro to GIS class to see if it was something I was interested in. I'd never heard of GIS before, but growing up I always loved looking at maps and mapping out our family's vacations, so I thought I'd give it a shot and test out this new path. As it turned out, I really enjoyed the course and decided to take more—eventually it became my major. With the help of a dedicated advisor in graduate school, I was able to continue in the geography/GIS field, while also applying it to the field of meteorology, which I've enjoyed since I was a kid. One aspect of GIS that I really love is that you can map almost anything! From what locals call a carbonated beverage to what type of tree is in your neighbor's backyard, it's all "map-able." I especially enjoy mapping weather and climate-related variables and its impacts on people and infrastructure, and using GIS to assist with the analysis. For my master's thesis I looked at the influence of tree type and precipitation in estimating the power outages from a hurricane. It was interesting to calculate the local variable importance and put that into ArcGIS to visualize which variable and tree type might have the most influence on outages in a given area. That powerful component of visualization in GIS was one of the major influencers that drew me to the field from the start." -Chris Maderia