A GIS Postgraduate’s Journal – June 12, 2013
The end is near, and that realization is beginning to creep up as fast as a debris flow. For those who haven’t been keeping up-to-date with my entries, I’m an Algonquin College student completing my postgraduate degree in Geographical Information Studies during an 11-month intensive program. The courses that I am currently mandatorily enrolled in are:
- Remote Sensing II
- GIS Project
- Web GIS Applications
- GIS Customization II
The most interesting, personally, is the Web GIS Applications course. From what I’ve learnt outside of school, this form of geomatics is where the industry is taking us. Additionally, I am working on my final GIS Project with the City of Kingston – a VGI mobile mapping application. The City of Kingston is my sponsor, and luckily for me the ‘in-between man’ is my Web GIS Applications professor. I am using ArcGIS Online – something that we did not learn throughout our program. However thanks to ESRI podcasts, ArcGIS Online tutorials, their extensive online help files and a great Web GIS book that I received with my ESRI scholarship, my brain is overflowing with accumulated knowledge. Today we are presenting our midterm work on our GIS Projects thus far, with the talk being predominantly focused on the current challenges to date and foreseeable risks moving forward. I am quite glad this is the focus, because preparing my presentation has helped me better understand the obstacles I have overcome, and made countless hours of trouble shooting seem more worthwhile in hindsight. Be prepared for an overview of my final project in our Projects category in August!
The other major happening would be preparing for, and searching for a co-op position for the fall of 2013. Our co-operative education faculty have been helping us with our resumes and finding companies who would like interns beginning in September. Some of my classmates, more than others, are being proactive in searching for their own potential internship positions, mostly in Ottawa, but some throughout Canada. I have yet to hear of anybody in my program taking this opportunity to work for four-months outside of Canada to gain international experience. So between midterm week, final project meetings and interviews, our traditional classes have been seeing students arrive late and leave midway through. Very few of taken the summer sunshine and warm weather as an excuse to not come on campus – tuition is too high to miss a class!
Off to study for midterms and listen to a podcast or two!
