Jacqueline Sosa - I am Panamanian, and live in Panama City, Panama. I wanted to find an internship I could apply what I had been learning in my GeoDesign courses in Panama. I decided that the Panama Canal would be an ideal place because stakeholders need maps and deal with large sets of data. So, I did an online search and found this page: https://micanaldepanama.com/nosotros/informacion-para-empleos/pdp/.
This information said that I need to submit my resume and a letter of recommendation from my academic institution. I submitted all the required materials, and got an interview with Canal de Panamá. During the interview, the interviewers repeatedly asked about my knowledge and competency in ArcGIS. Due to my GeoDesign courses, I was already familiar with ArcGIS and this enabled me to land my internship with Canal de Panamá in the Panama Canal engineering division for cartography and topography. They shared that they had been looking for someone who knew ArcGIS to be able to update all available Bathymetric maps of the Panama Canal.
This eight-week summer internship consisted of searching for all current data and making a final map that reflects recent information on the Panama Canal. I used a program called Caris Base Editor which is similar to ArcGIS. Learning how to use this software was invaluable because it gave me a new tool that I can utilize in my future work, and it also helped me to understand that with a knowledge of ArcGIS I can learn and adapt other Spatial Science software.
Overall, this internship taught me how to navigate new software and tools, to see how hard people work in order for something as big as the Panama Canal to function efficiently, as well as how I can be disciplined for my professional career.
