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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: What to do? Internet or database. |
| Date: |
08/17/2001 12:33:29 PM |
| From: |
Toland, Joseph |
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My advice: In my experience, I have seen such a wide range of GIS
backgrounds - from the bright high school graduate who falls into a GIS
niche to the Post-Doctoral GIS professional working with famous scientists.
My advice is thus: GIS stands as the moderator and quantifier of almost all
fields of natural science and can not only serve as the communication medium
for these science but can bring together quantitative information in new and
insightful ways. The GIS community can be broken down into a number of
segments - its use in the scientific community, sponsored by institutional
and governmental interests, and its use in the business community through
private investment. Many of the historically proficient users are located
within the first category because of the learning curve and
geostatistical/scientific knowledge necessary to run or apply some of the
older programs (arc 7.x: erdas) which required a lot of technical
proficiency, even for entry-level positions. As the interfaces have become
less command line driven, and more visually oriented, this has opened the
door to users who may not have been willing or able to invest the time and
energy in learning the more sophisticated platforms. And yet this new turn
in the industry does not affect the initial reasons for the development of
GIS and the community of users who worked with the more sophisticated
platforms. If anything, these newer platforms allow seasoned GIS
professionals the opportunity to address even more sophisticated problems,
in light of the optimization that the newer platforms can have for spatial
analysis, and operations. Being a mathematician, I am sure you can
appreciate the elegance. As far as education goes, I like the old maxim
"there's never a free lunch", or in other words, you get what you pay for.
If you go through a fast track program, your prospects are going to be more
tenuous than if you devoted a few years to getting a MS or Graduate
Certification from a good 4-year school. Also, the business community is
generally more unstable then the Institution/scientific or governmental. In
my opinion, and I have tried not to be too biased on the side of the
scientific community, but I think the cool kids are using GIS and science
together to explore and understand the world in new ways which are only now
possible with platforms like GIS. So, with your background in Mathematics,
I would hate to neglect to mention how close a leap from your background to
the sciences and GIS would be. I guess I just think that developing GIS
based models for the Mars pathfinder mission would be an order of magnitude
cooler than predicting marketing indicators or something. Well, Good luck.
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