Any former geography majors that do not do GIS work (skills, degrees)
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Hi, I'm an incoming freshman planning on majoring in geography. I've got a little tiny bit of experience doing some programming and GIS as a hobby, but recently I've lost some interest in it, or at least lost interest in using qgis. I was wondering if any geography majors or people you happen to know had jobs in other areas. I'm interested in working with the environment, but the closest major to that is environmental studies which is a VERY broad major at my college, there is however, a lot of overlap with the geography major so I could double major in that very easily.
Anyway, I asked my geography professor about this and he sent me this:
"The Program In Geography at (my college) is a small one, but our graduates do very well. Over my 20 years as a professor at (my college), my B.A. graduates have developed a variety of impressive careers as well as earned graduate and professional degrees.
As you probably know, geographers engage in careers that are currently ranked highly in the U.S. Department of Labor’s “bright outlook” category. These include Geographic Information Systems analyst; strategic, military and air photo interpretation specialist; travel and tourism strategic planner; economic development specialist; urban/community planner; nonprofit organization executive; neighborhood housing development official; environmental conservation manager; natural resource specialist; wetlands and eco-systems manager; estuarine and riverine systems researcher; National Parks Service open space and facilities planner/field specialist; general government services officer (federal and state civil service); demographic statistical analyst; natural hazard response planner; hazard mitigation/impact reduction planner; regional location analyst for expanding and/or relocating corporations; market area data analyst; and the list goes on…!
Our alumni work as city and town planners in Rhode Island; GIS specialists for independent consulting firms as well as for state agencies like RI DEM and RI DOT; policy researchers; parks superintendents; nonprofit/affordable housing developers; teachers; professors; and myriad other technical and professional fields throughout Rhode Island and the United States."
I'm unsure if there are really any jobs that aren't GIS related to geography besides teaching. I'm interested in urban planning, disaster management, and research. Thanks in advance.
Last edited by GhostyOne; 06-17-2015 at 12:20 PM..
GIS is just a tool for doing geography. Very few people actually do well just purely doing GIS (and most of those are high level researchers). Most of the ones not doing much GIS are in natural resources at some level though.
I also wonder if a geographer's use of GIS would be different and more interesting than your use of it as a high schooler. You haven't really had a lot of geography yet.
I have a GIS background, but I'm in Product Management for a geospatial line of products now.
I worked in a GIS role for about 5 years but got tired of it, as there is little room for advancement in my opinion unless you want to become a GIS Manager. (Also got tired of ArcGIS and being forced to use a Windows computer every day, but that's another story)
You said you have programming skills, which are always in demand. You could possibly get a programming job, but at an environmental firm? i.e., writing web apps etc?
If you don't like using as in not using a computer, you are probably shooting yourself in the foot. Think of how many problems there are in the work world that can be made easier by tying the question into the computer. For every problem that might be able to be done by a computer that does not use GIS, that problem can still be simpler, probably, by tying it into some GIS program.
You mentioned disaster management. With things like http://response.restoration.noaa.gov...response-tools , who in their right mind would hire someone who didn't use such tools, who wouldn't take advantage of speed where speed is essential?
HOWEVER, there is the possibility of finding countries on this planet that don't allow the use of computers or GIS due to religious restrictions (speculating, I don't know of any particular ones), so there is the plausibility of work out there.
Conclusion: if you don't want to work using a computer, you better learn some foreign languages and be fluent in them because lacking a computer ability in the first world is bound to be a handicap.
IMHO...................
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