Minor in Spatial Studies

Right after graduating USC in May 2015 with a major in Policy, Planning, and Development and a minor in Spatial Studies, I started a job as a contracted GIS Technician for Apple engineering teams. I worked with spatial data providing technical services, assessing, validating and enhancing world location data content for consumer applications and metrics.

While working with Apple, I obtained the USC GIST online graduate certificate, but I was still looking for greater opportunities, more related to my passion for urban planning.

With the graduate certificate on my resume, I quickly received another offer to join the Enterprise GIS team at San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) as a contractor, and then as a consultant. Even though there are only two Principal GIS Analysts and me, BART’s GIS repertoire is renown, winning multiple Esri achievement awards. In my first couple of weeks, I attending training for Schnieder Electric’s ArcFM extension for fiber optic network.

I was the primary implementation and management specialist for BART’s over 13 million feet of fiber optic cable connecting major transportation and telecommunication companies throughout the Bay Area. I also help out with various cartography related tasks for the construction teams, planners, IT department, police department and other departments within the larger transit agency, as well as data clean-up and asset feature data updates to ensure our data integrity, and heads-up digitizing.

I have learned so much while I was with BART, and recently decided to finish my USC M.S. in GIST degree. Since I now have a focus and a bit of a specialization, it is much easier to choose a relevant thesis and choose classes based on my career goals. Being a part of BART is such a great opportunity that I never would have gotten without USC’s stellar reputation and the heavy emphasis on the ArcGIS suite.

Now I am the Senior GIS Technician for the City of Vancouver, Washington. My USC education has given me the tools to learn on the job and become an expert in a field I never would have guessed.

Spatial Studies offers the unique opportunity of bringing new insights to many different fields of study by applying spatial thinking. My interest in GIS stemmed from taking classes with the Spatial Sciences Institute, where I immediately became fascinated by its practicality and wide-spread application. As an Environmental Science and Health major, I found the Spatial Studies minor to be the perfect complement to my course of study. This minor allowed me to go beyond acquiring knowledge and provided an essential technical skillset within environmental applications.

Through the minor, I have had the opportunity to work with the Spatial Sciences Institute as an undergraduate researcher with Dr. Su Jin Lee and fellow students for two years. During my first year of research, I was able to use spatial thinking for an environmental project analyzing the spatial patterns of air pollution and different contributing factors in Los Angeles County. For my second year of research, I participated in a study looking at how municipal policies affect tree cover within the 30 largest cities in Los Angeles County. These research opportunities have provided me with valuable experience and have cultivated my interest in GIS.

I continued my GIS journey by obtaining the USC M.S. in Geographic Information Science and Technology through the Progressive Degree Program.

Now I am working as Senior Specialist, Global Security Communications Center at The Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California.

Spatial sciences formed an important part of my time at USC and will always influence the way that I think about the world around me.

The Spatial Studies minor, particularly the knowledge of GIS, was the perfect addition to round out my education alongside my Environmental Studies and Archaeology degrees for its practicality and its insights.

Beyond the classroom, my most formative experiences were working as a student researcher within the Spatial Sciences Institute. My sophomore year, I had the opportunity to be a Geodesign Fellow which was the first time the skills I learned during courses was applied to the real world problems of infrastructure and sustainability. Over the rest of my time at USC, I was a part of the Urban Trees Initiative, where we leveraged GIS to better understand canopy conditions across Los Angeles.

These experiences, alongside my coursework, even allowed me to become a Solution Engineer intern at Esri the summer after I graduated in large part due to the large number of ArcGIS products I became familiar with.

Since graduating, GIS has been a key part of my thesis research for my master’s of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge. By building a strong foundation of GIS analysis at USC, I was able to focus on the archaeological, scientific, and statistical aspects of the project. As I finish my graduate degree, I am currently looking for various jobs at the intersection of GIS and sustainability.

I know that the skills I gained at the Spatial Sciences Institute will be essential in whatever place I settle. With potential applications in local government and sustainability planning, energy and natural resources, infrastructure and business analytics, the minor in Spatial Studies has opened the door to many potential sectors I had not previously considered.