On slower days in my high school years, I found myself dropping a Google Street View pin at a random location around the world and exploring endlessly, trying to immerse myself in the fabric of a place that I may never even visit. My experiences exploring the world through this medium in addition to visiting significant historical, architectural, and natural landmarks throughout my youth cemented my love for engaging in the spatial sciences and Geodesign before I even began the major.
My experiences through the Spatial Sciences Institute have included an internship at the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), where I developed a web application to display large amounts of land use, transportation, resource, farmland, and growth data for the six counties under the organization’s jurisdiction. This opportunity has been crucial in developing my understanding of data visualization and interactive spatial media. The creation of this application allowed me to act as a small piece of the organization’s goals to boost sustainable growth and transportation interconnectivity in the Southern California region.
My coursework in Geodesign has been extremely rewarding and has allowed me to think about modern problems in terms of modern solutions. I now see important issues such as gentrification, homelessness, and increasing walkability in cities, to name a few, not only in terms of data, maps and figures, but through the people of the place, and their history. Geodesign’s interdisciplinary nature is extremely engaging to me as someone who has always immersed myself in vastly different fields, and I look forward to engaging in myriad topics and working with multitudes of people from different backgrounds ceaselessly into my future.
