tommy's scratchpad

So November 15 is this year’s GIS Day. I’ll be in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where the first GIS was born. Though I don’t live there anymore, I still try to make it there for GIS Day, and am lucky enough to be there this year as it turns out.

Where will you be and how will you be celebrating GIS Day?

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.