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Sidenote, but people actually take GIS classes? Even in high school? Never heard of such a thing. As someone that does GIS related work professionally, that ca

Sidenote, but people actually take GIS classes? Even in high school? Never heard of such a thing. As someone that does GIS related work professionally, that caught me by surprise.

Waterluvian 7y ago
I got into GIS because my public high school happened to be a "GIS magnet school." Turned out that was basically the only thing I actually felt interested in actually doing well in. My university had a geography program where I focused on GIS and remote sensing among other minor focuses (you really have to be multidisciplinary in geography). By the time I finished my Master's they had a dedicated Geomatics program which was a lot more GIS heavy. Hope that answers your question.
grawprog 7y ago
I had a couple GIS courses in University, along with a few mapping and survey courses. We also used arcGIS extensively for different projects in other courses and for our year long research project. I had never heard of GIS in high school though.
roel_v 7y ago
There are entire master's degrees in 'GIS', which are essentially a whole year of learning how to use ArcGIS, from different points of view.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  The amount of academic capture by Esri is crazy. Though to their credit my profs forced us to use QGIS a lot and learn enough Python to write our own workflows both in QGIS and model builder. I'd say most students still just became GIS button pushers but some definitely broke out of that capture and began making their own tools.
  - Xelbair 7y ago
    On the other hand there are people like me - where GIS course at university was basically "setup a postgres DB, load test data, add a feature in qgis" - and in professional work i had to probably re-discover everything. If someone with proper education in the field would look at my topology checking code, they would die a bit inside.
    - Waterluvian 7y ago
      My databases course was like that too. I think a lot of the point was just exposure to the principles and technologies.
WildGreenLeave 7y ago
As a software developer that has never had any GIS classes, what is the best way to get started in this? Every time I see something as cool as this I want to learn it and find some way to apply it and create something cool, but I never seem to find a project that I can dive into or be able to apply it in real world. (But I'm sure this is because my surroundings just aren't interested in it)
- war1025 7y ago
  I honestly just sort of fell into a job where it was relevant. I don't know that there is anything inherently interesting about it. It's mostly just lat/lon coordinates and putting stuff on maps.

Sidenote, but people actually take GIS classes? Even in high school? Never heard of such a thing. As someone that does GIS related work professionally, that caught me by surprise.

Waterluvian 7y ago

I got into GIS because my public high school happened to be a "GIS magnet school." Turned out that was basically the only thing I actually felt interested in actually doing well in. My university had a geography program where I focused on GIS and remote sensing among other minor focuses (you really have to be multidisciplinary in geography). By the time I finished my Master's they had a dedicated Geomatics program which was a lot more GIS heavy. Hope that answers your question.

grawprog 7y ago

I had a couple GIS courses in University, along with a few mapping and survey courses. We also used arcGIS extensively for different projects in other courses and for our year long research project. I had never heard of GIS in high school though.

roel_v 7y ago

There are entire master's degrees in 'GIS', which are essentially a whole year of learning how to use ArcGIS, from different points of view.

Waterluvian 7y ago
The amount of academic capture by Esri is crazy. Though to their credit my profs forced us to use QGIS a lot and learn enough Python to write our own workflows both in QGIS and model builder. I'd say most students still just became GIS button pushers but some definitely broke out of that capture and began making their own tools.
- Xelbair 7y ago
  On the other hand there are people like me - where GIS course at university was basically "setup a postgres DB, load test data, add a feature in qgis" - and in professional work i had to probably re-discover everything. If someone with proper education in the field would look at my topology checking code, they would die a bit inside.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    My databases course was like that too. I think a lot of the point was just exposure to the principles and technologies.

WildGreenLeave 7y ago

As a software developer that has never had any GIS classes, what is the best way to get started in this? Every time I see something as cool as this I want to learn it and find some way to apply it and create something cool, but I never seem to find a project that I can dive into or be able to apply it in real world. (But I'm sure this is because my surroundings just aren't interested in it)

war1025 7y ago
I honestly just sort of fell into a job where it was relevant. I don't know that there is anything inherently interesting about it. It's mostly just lat/lon coordinates and putting stuff on maps.