Why I'm Interested in GIS

My name is David J Corcoran.

I am currently an undergraduate student majoring in Geography with an emphasis on GIS.

Over the course of my life, I have always been fascinated by maps. As early as I knew how to read, I was completely engaged in my father's Rand McNally road atlas. When bored in class, I'd draw maps of roads, airports, even occasional terrain in the margins. When I grew up, I wanted to be a cartographer. My fascination and love for maps and mapping has not wavered since those early years.

After several twists and turns along my college path, I finally decided last Thanksgiving that I should follow my heart and go for majoring in GIS, resulting in me transferring universities, changing majors, and moving halfway across the country from Seattle. It was a big gamble, but after the first semester I was fairly certain I'd made the right call.

This last summer, I was fortunate enough to intern in my hometown of McCall, Idaho, which shockingly has apparently had a summer GIS intern position for the last several years. Despite my lack of much actual GIS knowledge, I secured the position. While the work I did there would appear to be mundane in the eyes of most (I was primarily a data gopher who helped build the city's parcel layer), I still managed to find a surprising amount of enjoyment from it. Simultaneously, I ended up working a few hours a week at the US Forest Service office in McCall, where I did a lot of simple cartography for their office (mainly making maps for PowerPoint presentations and things like that). After these experiences, I remained interested in GIS. It just so happens that this class is a very important building block for becoming professionally active in GIS, so I went ahead and took it.

I would give myself an 8 in overall computer ability. While I am not a total "computer geek," I am quite proficient with computers, and rarely run into an issue I cannot figure out how to solve. I am inexperienced with computer programming, something I would like to resolve at some point in my life.

In terms of GIS experience, I'll give myself a 3.5. I have a few hundred hours of experience behind the wheel of ArcGIS, and while much of that was simple modification of attribute tables with the occasional need to re-draw a polygon, I've been exposed to the layers and systems used both in a small town GIS and a forest service GIS. I have fairly minimal experience with cartography, a skill I would like to improve on, be it in this class or at some other point in the future.

As far as specifics, I know I have a lot to learn, and there's nothing that I know so well that I couldn't probably learn more about it, so beyond the generic "I want to learn as much as possible," any skills that look darn good on a resume are fantastic.