I Like Maps

A lot. I always have. When I was a little kid and my friends were drawing puppies and kitties, I was sitting with my dad in front of an atlas copying national flags (to the best of my ability). When I got to middle school, I loved International Night and all the mapping activities we did to prepare for it; I also (unintentionally) tortured my French teacher by asking her to tell me the French name of every country in Europe. In seventh grade, I was the only one excited about the prospect of memorizing the location of every country in Africa and the only one who wasn't distressed when Zaire became The Democratic Republic of the Congo two days before the test. By high school I had learned to channel this interest into learning world history. A special topics course in South Asian History determined my college choices, as I decided that I needed to major in anthropology and minor in history at a school that had a study abroad program in Sri Lanka.

I've been searching for a way to apply this interest and knowledge for a long time. I thought the Foreign Service might be a way to channel it—and it may be—but it's going to be a few more weeks before I find out whether I even passed the test, let alone make it through all of the interviews and training to work abroad. Yesterday I decided to look through City College's course catalog and see what they had to offer in the way of geography. Sadly, the class I am most interested in taking is at exactly the same time as my weekly Musae rehearsal; however, there is an Introduction to GIS class at a much better time. I didn't know what GIS was, so I looked it up. It stands for Geographic Information Systems. Rather than ramble on about it here, check out the GIS website if you want to know more.

I did some further research to determine what careers could come from this training and found that GIS can be applied to just about anything. Perhaps I could combine my interests in demography and statistics with GIS…