Maps!

So it was brought to my attention (hi Michelle!) that I have never really talked much on the blog about my connection to maps. I did previously on an older version of this blog that now no longer exists but no one was really reading it back then anyway so here goes!

Waaaay back in the day, (okay it was 1995), I started my college career at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in the pre-pharmacy program. If you've never heard of UMBC I will quickly tell you that we have a world championship chess team, made it to the first round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament once and have consistently been named an up-and-coming university by Newsweek the past few years. Why pre-pharmacy? I had no idea what I really wanted to do and this seemed like a good plan. Until I failed chemistry my first semester that is. This was quite a blow to an over-achiever who pretty much only ever got A's and B's. That plan, was kaput. One of my new friends suggested that I try a geography class. Around the same time I was studying outside some classrooms and overheard a professor informing his physical geography class of all of the amazing things they could do with a geography degree. I was hooked. I took a couple of classes and promptly changed my major. As a kid I loved looking over maps and studying them. This was a perfect fit. In my remaining 3 1/2 years I took all sorts of interesting classes but the courses on Cartography and Geographic Information Systems were by far my favorites.

During my senior year I picked up an internship with the Maryland Department of the Environment working on floodplain management issues using GIS. It was an interesting place to start. I graduated in the summer of 1999 with a B.S. in Geography and Environmental Systems and a certificate in Cartography. I have since moved on through a handful of different jobs some incorporating less mapping work and then some completely devoted to it. I worked on floodplain maps, maps relating to natural resources management and city maps of the District of Columbia before finally landing at my current federal government job 5 1/2 years ago. I don't really talk about it much on the blog for a variety of reasons but if you would like to see some examples of my work I will tell you that I have been published (and I'll also tell you that when I got married I traded up from that 11 letters of Polish-last-nameness to something much shorter and easier to pronounce). I can summarize by saying that I do a lot of work mapping various statistics in support of a small policy-making agency.

In 2008, at the recommendation of my coworkers, I decided to go for a Masters degree. UMBC had just created a Masters of Professional Studies program for Geographic Information Systems at a remote campus closer to DC than the main campus in Baltimore. It seemed like a perfect fit with the exception of the whole paying out of state tuition thing now that I'm a Virginia resident. 2 years and 30 credits later I was all mastered up and now I'm wondering if I should move on to something more challenging. The job market isn't great right now though so I'm just speculating.

So why maps? They are so dynamic. They have the ability to be both useful and beautiful at the same time. So much thought and effort goes into creating a truly meaningful and useful map product. It's not just all about giving directions, although this is one key role that maps play. Sometimes it's about taking numbers and turning them into something more visually compelling than just a list. Sometimes it's about being able to locate and follow a trend. Sometimes it's about tracking a problem back to its source. And, of course sometimes it's just about having something fun to look at. I'm kind of obsessed, I will admit. Things are always changing. There will always be things to map. When Jake and I took our first trip to Ireland I bought the most up-to-date Atlas available to guide us as we drove around the country. I'll admit I'm not a big fan of GPS navigation. I dig the technology but I just can't seem to accept a need for it yet. Anyway, the areas in the suburbs of Dublin were really expanding at the time and there were a number of proposed roads marked in the atlas that were actually already open for driving. As if that whole driving on the left thing didn't make that trip interesting enough.

So before this gets too long, I'll close with a funny story. At the time Jake and I met I was working for the DC Office of Planning and living in a small studio apartment. The morning after the very first night he stayed at my place (I swear we'd been dating for at least 2 weeks at that point!) I got a call from a coworker asking me how she'd go about driving over to the eastern shore of Maryland. I looked at Jake, eating his breakfast, and asked him not to judge me as I pulled a huge collection of rolled maps out from under my bed to find the one I needed to give her directions. He just laughed, completely understanding. Of course now I would just tell someone to use Google maps.

So in closing, I am obsessed with maps. I could stare at aerial and satellite images online for hours. I'm a geek, but a passionate one and maps make me very happy.

UMBC logo from here, floodplain map snippet from here and books from my desk at work.