My Studies, Geography, & Technology

My first tertiary-school program was the Associate of Arts in Liberal Arts from North Shore Community College. I remember how nervous I was when I was first getting ready to attend. I even flipped out and said I wanted to take time off before going. Thankfully, my college experience was smooth, and I enjoyed all of my classes a lot. I had a lot of encouragement from my parents, especially my mom. During this time in my life, I was reasonably independent, and was able to take a lot of responsibility and initiative regarding my course of study.

For undergrad, I continued my studies at Salem State. I still struggled to decide what I wanted to do with my life and education, so applied for a math major, education and legal studies minors, and attempted to get accepted into music as my second major. I enjoyed a lot of quality time with the math and music departments during this period, but ultimately only finished a math minor. As fate would have it, I fell in love with the geography department! Geography was a unique choice for those who had trouble choosing a direction, because geographers perform both social scientific and natural scientific work.

My specific major was "cartography and geographic information systems", a mouthful often shortened to "cartography and GIS". GIS is a particular field of application for what we call "information systems", comprising hardware, software, and "meatware" AKA the human element. In our program, we learned statistical practices and algorithms to work with raster and vector data, how to manage data and databases, and the different decisions that go into designing quality information products and services. I was able to gain a lot of technicianship in geography software, and was later able to use this skill to intern with my municipal planning department. Our small, rural town literally only had one person for a planning department, so I got to introduce the free software solution QGIS to get novel projects done.

Recently, I was pleased to see LinkedIn Learning offered a couple courses on QGIS. For them, it seemed a bit off the beaten path. Free software has a complicated relationship with the major vendors of proprietary software, including MicroSoft, owner of LinkedIn. The leading technology conglomerates in the United States strategically embrace it under the name "open source" and actively maintain relationships with the self-described open source community both for the purpose of public relations and to court the attention of potential developers. In many ecosystems, free and open source software is most available to developers, while normal end-users are left in the dark about the possibilities of their systems.