Geographic Information Systems

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Why did you chose GIS as a career? (self.gis)

submitted 1 year ago by necrxfagivs to c/gis

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I'm curious why did you all chose GIS as a career, as is a "niche" field. It's widely used but not much people know about it.

In my case I studied History & Geography and had to use GIS during one course. I really liked it and I also like to code, so I guessed GIS could be a career for me as I didn't want to be a teacher back then.

I'm now finishing a GIS Maters and working as a GIS analyst, using python to automate routines. Is my first job in the field (started as an intern).

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[–] xodiak 1 points 1 year ago

I went to college in the early 1990s not knowing what I wanted to do. Getting my general courses out of the way at a local community college, I took a Geography class and fell in love with almost everything about Geography. After a couple of years, I moved on to a University to major in Geography wanting to make maps magazines basically. Like Newsweek, Time or even National Geographic. Or become a teacher, which I did not want to do. Then two of my Geography professors started pushing GIS as a discipline/career and offering basic courses. I loved everything about GIS. Three months out of college in 1995, I landed a job as a GIS Coordinator for a very small rural midwestern county.

It was a 100% ground-floor GIS implementation starting with the County Assessor, like most county GIS started. I walk into my new office on my first day and in the middle of the room were stacks of boxes containing an AIX/Unix workstation. 26" CRT monitor, Arc/INFO workstation software and an HP DesignJet 650c (I think). It was a challenge learning both Unix and possibly the most complicated GIS software ever. For the kids who may not know, Arc/Info workstation was a command line-driven GIS software from Esri. ALL aspects of using the software had to be typed into a command line. Until you learned the art of making custom menus.

Then we bought a used HUGE digitizing table. The guy was at least 6ft x 5ft with motorized lift and tilt.

Anyway, I've been doing this for about 28 years now. I'm still enjoying it for the most part. I'm in the private sector now and don't really care for the stress and worry of always having to make a profit.