Bucknell will be hosting a GIS in higher education conference from Friday, Nov. 16th through Sunday, Nov. 18th. The conference will focus on sharing ideas and examples of integrating GIS into teaching and research in the higher ed curriculum as well as opportunities for sharing research datasets and web map apps. Target audience includes faculty, GIS specialists and students. Stay tuned for details on keynote speaker, session topics and how to submit papers & maps.
If you are a second semester senior looking for a full-time job or a returning student considering summer internship options, check out the links below from the ESRI newsletter for students and recent graduates.If you don’t already know, ESRI is more or less the Microsoft of the GIS world. Having an ESRI job or internship on your resume will open a lot of doors for you in the GIS world. Having worked at ESRI’s Philadelphia regional office for a number of years I can tell you from first hand experience that ESRI is an incredibly exciting, challenging and rewarding place to work (whether you are at the mothership in Redlands or any one of the many regional offices).
Read through the info below and/or set up an appointment to talk with me about GIS job options.
Students looking for an opportunity to earn while they learn are invited to check out Esri’s summer programs.
- The Internship Program provides students with personal and professional development skills as they are mentored by staff from all disciplines. We will have more than 60 interns this summer, primarily in software and product development, professional services, and support, but interns are placed throughout the company. Check your major and see where you might fit, and then learn what former interns have to say in this video or on the Esri Careers blog.
- Participants in the Student Assistantship Program attend the Esri International User Conference, the ultimate event for anyone working with GIS. In exchange for helping out during the conference, students attend sessions and network with others who share their passion for GIS. Watch a video of former assistants.
Attend an Esri Conference Free
- We are seeking student volunteers to help out at the annual Esri Federal GIS Conference, February 22 – 24, 2012, in Washington, D.C. If selected, you will attend this event for free in exchange for volunteering a day or more of your time. Some of the duties include greeting attendees, working registration, and monitoring sessions. View details [PDF].
Meet Esri Staff at AAG
- If you’re planning on attending the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in New York, New York, February 24 – 28, 2012, make time to stop by the Esri booth to meet staff from our software development and industry solutions teams. See a demo of our latest software and learn what it’s like to be part of the Esri team. We’ll also have a booth in the Jobs in Geography Center.
Career Opportunities for New Grads
- Graduating soon? There’s no better way to start your career than with a world-leading software development company. Esri offers a number of opportunities for new grads such as programmers, product engineers, support analysts, test engineers, and geospatial analysts.
- Qualifications for these positions vary, but in general, we are seeking graduates with degrees in GIS, geography, computer science, computer engineering, or related fields. Learn where you might fit at Esri, and then search our current openings.
Here’s another treasure trove of data that’s ready and waiting to be added to your ArcMap session.
Over the last several years the New York Public Library has scanned more than 10,000 public domain historic maps and atlases of New York City and made digital copies of those maps available via its website. Recently NYPL took this project to the next level by creating a web tool that can be used (by NYPL staff as well as volunteers from the general public) to georeference the maps – i.e. pin the historic maps down to their location on a modern-day reference map. Click here to check out their blog post about the project. Or click here to check out the do-it-yourself MapWarper tool and/or browse through the thousands of maps that have already been georectified.
What’s the big deal about being able to look at historic maps in GIS? Here’s an excerpt from the NYPL blog post on the project that does a great job of explaining how GIS can shed new light on old maps.
So, what does this all mean? If we have documents related to past times and past places (old maps), then we can create data to “rebuild” those past times and past places. And if we “rebuild” old places in virtual space, we can then organize a universe of other information around those old places. Wouldn’t it be great to haveyelp.com and menupages.com, but for old restaurants and with old menus and prices? Or to have at least a smattering of old photos in a historical street view? Or to search the National Newspaper Digitization Project using a map interface? At the core of all of these dream-like research futures is geographic information, in machine-readable format. And to get there, we need to warp, crop, mosaic, and trace our old maps. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. And as a positive byproduct, the maps just so happen to become more useful at each step along the way.
Using the NYPL website to find GIS-ready historic maps is incredibly easy. I used the ‘search by map’ option to zoom into Prospect Park in Brooklyn to find georectified historic maps that I could download and add straight to my ArcMap session. A whopping 394 maps were returned in the results – i.e. 394 maps that I could download as a KMZ file and add directly to ArcMap to explore how this small chunk of turf grew, changed and evolved through time to become the place that it is now.
If you find maps in the NYPL collection that have the historic places or events that you are interested in, but are not yet GIS-ready, you can use the MapWarper tool to georeference them yourself. Here’s a link to instructions for using the MapWarper – along with a YouTube video that describes the process.
httpv://youtu.be/G8ms_eBU8MQ
In recent weeks I’ve talked to a number of second semester seniors about GIS job options. I’m hoping at some point to write a blog post with links to GIS job search sites and other resources, but for now I’m just going to pass along job listings as I see them.
I just got an e-mail from Jon Caris, the GIS Specialist at Smith College in Northampton, MA saying that Smith is looking to hire a new or recent college graduate (within 3 years) for the brand new Post-Baccalaureate Spatial Analysis Fellow position. Start date is July 2012 – direct link to the posting can be found here. This position is ideal for a student hoping to gain additional GIS experience before looking for a permanent job, or as a bridge before graduate school. Duties are similar to what the team of GIS Student Assistants do at Bucknell and include:
If this sounds interesting to you please talk to me. Jon is doing a whole bunch of really innovative things with GIS at Smith and would be an incredible mentor to work with!
ESRI just added Business Analyst and Community Analyst to Bucknell’s site license. What that means for you is that you will soon have access to several thousand ‘ready-to-map’ data variables – all within ArcMap. You’ll also be able to use tools from the Business Analyst extension to do site selection, customer profiling, market penetration and other types of business analysis. But really, the exciting part here is the GIANT JACKPOT OF DATA. Check out the lists below to get an idea of the types of variables that you will be able to add to ArcMap with just the click of a mouse.
I’m working on getting these datasets pushed out to the labs and faculty computers as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more details.
Current-year updates and five-year projections of Esri’s Updated Demographics use more than 1,600 variables about employee population, population by occupation/industry, disposable income, and consumer expenditures all at the United States, state, county, ZIP Code, census tract, block group, core-based statistical area, and designated market area geography levels.
Esri’s Tapestry Segmentation classifies U.S. neighborhoods into 65 segments based on their socioeconomic and demographic compositions. The market segmentation data is available at the census tract level and above.
Annually updated data details which products and services consumers buy. Approximately 90 variables in 15 categories such as apparel, food, and financial are included.
A national database of approximately 12 million U.S. businesses from Infogroup to identify customers and competitors, business data is arranged by business name, industry description or SIC/North American Industry Classification System, sales, employees, and location.
The national database from the Directory of Major Malls, Inc., lists detailed information for more than 4,200 major shopping centers, malls, and lifestyle/specialty centers in the United States. Major shopping centers’ variables include center name, gross leasable area, type of center, total retail sales, distance to the nearest competing center, name of and distance to the nearest major city, and total number of stores.
Tele Atlas’ high-quality, nationwide street and geocoding databases provide routing attributes and attractive map displays as a single street database source. Business Analyst Desktop includes Esri’s geocoder that integrates an address-based approach with more than 54 million residential and commercial U.S. structure addresses from the Tele Atlas Address Points database. This database maps street addresses to a physical location, so each address is a fixed point and not an interpolation from an address range.
| Bing Facility and Business Search |
| Infogroup Facility and Business Search |
| Mapping of Crime Data |
| Behavior and Preferences Reports |
| Electronics and Internet Market Potential |
| Financial Investments Market Potential |
| Health and Beauty Market Potential |
| Pets and Products Market Potential |
| Restaurant Market Potential |
| Retail Market Potential |
| Sports and Leisure Market Potential |
| Demographic Reports |
| 1990–2000 Comparison Profile |
| Age 50+ Profile |
| Age by Income Profile |
| Age by Sex by Race Profile |
| Age by Sex Profile |
| American Community Survey (ACS) Housing Summary |
| American Community Survey (ACS) Population Summary |
| Census 2010 Geography Profile |
| Census 2000 Detailed Race Profile |
| Census 2000 Summary Profile |
| Community Profile |
| Demographic and Income Comparison Profile |
| Demographic and Income Profile |
| Detailed Age Profile |
| Detailed Income Profile |
| Demographic Reports (continued) |
| Disposable Income Profile |
| Executive Summary |
| Graphic Profile |
| Housing Profile |
| Net Worth Profile |
| Quarterly Demographic Profile |
| Neighborhood Type Reports |
| Dominant TapestryTM |
| Tapestry Segmentation Area Profile |
| Spending Reports |
| Automotive Aftermarket Expenditures |
| Financial Expenditures |
| House and Home Expenditures |
| Household Budget Expenditures |
| Medical Expenditures |
| Recreation Expenditures |
| Retail Goods and Services Expenditures |
| Economic Activity Reports |
| Business Locator |
| Business Summary |
| Major Shopping Center Locator |
| Major Shopping Center Map |
| Retail MarketPlace Profile |
| Maps and Aerial Imagery |
| Site Details Map |
| Site Map |
| Site Map with Satellite Imagery |
| Traffic Maps and Reports |
| Traffic Count Profile |
| Traffic Count Profile Map |
| Color-Coded Maps and Smart Map Search |
| AGS CrimeRisk Data |
| Behavior and Preferences Data |
| Consumer Spending Data |
| Demographic Data |
| Economic Activity/Business Data |
| Neighborhood Type/Tapestry Data |
| Public Data (USDA, EPA, CDC, and more) |