Navigating the GIS Journey

Join us for an episode of UMBC's Mic'd Up podcast, where Dennise Cardona, from the Office of Professional Programs at UMBC, engages in a candid conversation with Joe Gallagher, a Ph.D. student in the GES program and a current certificate student in the GIS program.

Joe shares his educational journey, from completing coursework to balancing student obligations and a new job using his geography skills. Discover how GIS courses at UMBC played a pivotal role in shaping Joe's skills and preparing him for real-world challenges.

Explore Joe's initial reservations about GIS courses, his passion for R programming, and the transformative impact of the UMBC GIS program on his professional growth. Gain valuable insights into data analysis, GIS applications, and the importance of bringing strong passions.

Whether you're a GIS enthusiast, a student contemplating the GIS journey, or someone curious about the intersection of geography and technology, this episode offers a wealth of information and inspiration. Tune in to learn how anyone can become a data analyst with the right tools and mindset.

🔗 For more information about UMBC's GIS graduate program, visit us here: https://umbc.edu/gis

Take advantage of this episode filled with practical advice, real-world experiences, and a glimpse into the exciting possibilities of GIS. Subscribe to UMBC's Mic'd Up podcast for more engaging conversations with the university's diverse and dynamic community.

Transcript

Dennise Cardona  0:00  
Welcome to UMBC's Mic'd Up podcast. My name is Dennise Cardona from the Office of Professional Programs at UMBC. Today, I am joined by Joe Gallagher, a PhD student in the GES program at UMBC. And also a graduate certificate student taking some of our GIS courses. Welcome, Joe. It's great to have you here on the podcast.

Joe Gallagher  0:22  
It's great to be here, Dennise.

Dennise Cardona  0:25  
Thank you so much. So I'd love to hear some, hear your thoughts. Where are you right now in your educational journey? 

Joe Gallagher  0:31  
Actually, so I am two years into the Ph. D program. And basically at the point where I wrapped up all my coursework, and the next stage would be comprehensive exams, and dissertation proposal defense. And I the two years wrapped up last May. So I've actually been taking some time off in the interim, during which time, during which time, I've actually also helped out with running one of the GIS classes. But I hit pause on my studies because I actually got a job with the Federal Transit Administration. So now I'm, I'm contemplating how to going forward judge student obligations with obligations as a federal employee, but it was a real thrill. Because I feel like the two years of coursework I had really prepared me well for my job at the Federal Transit Administration. 

Dennise Cardona  1:24  
Congratulations. That's fantastic. Sounds like a fantastic opportunity for you. And yeah, that whole, the work life balance is something that is really critical to well being and being able to put your best foot forward in the workforce and at home and all. So that is a, I'm sure. A big consideration point. How do you do that? And what do you keep on your plate? And maybe what are you pushed to the side slightly? So that's probably going to be an ongoing process for you.

Joe Gallagher  1:52  
For sure, for sure. 

Dennise Cardona  1:53  
Yeah. Can you share what motivated you to choose to take some courses with the GIS, the geographic information systems graduate program at UMBC, and maybe what aspects of the courses attracted you to take them?

Joe Gallagher  2:07  
I've been a geography student now for a long time I. I was a geography major and undergrad from 2014 to 2018. Then I did my masters in geography in 2019, to 2021. And then now a PhD student in geography. But the amazing thing was that for the, for my undergrad and my master's degree, I avoided GIS as much as I could, I took a few courses as an undergrad. But at the time, I found GIS, like a little intimidating. And I also didn't think it lined up too much with my research interests. I was more interested in questions about like, how transportation and other infrastructure was like delivering equity or like reproducing existing inequalities. And at the time, I just didn't understand how GIS can answer those questions. A lot of the coursework that was related to GIS I took as an undergrad was related to public health or the environment, which are both like really fantastic subject areas. And GIS is like a really powerful tool to answer questions in those fields that just didn't line up with my interests a lot. And I actually struggled a little bit in those classes. So then on my master's, I completely avoided GIS, certainly other quantitative methods. But then as I got deeper into the rabbit hole of transit, and like transportation issues, as a master's students, I realized, oh, at some point, I'm gonna have to learn the tools that practitioners in this field use. And I'm gonna have to get a little more savvy with data analysis. And I'm gonna have to get a little more savvy with GIS because transit is very spatial. And GIS is an incredibly important part of planning transit, but also representing transit in terms of performance and where it actually goes. And I was about sir, my PhD at UMBC to work with Dillon Mahmoudi, who had done some really cool critical GIS work related to bike lane infrastructure in Portland. So I felt like I'm going to be in good hands there. There'll be the there's some good people, it seems like there's some good people in this department who I will be able to match my needs, with whatever they're teaching. There's just just seemed like it was good questions being asked at UMBC. And, and also, maybe GIS had changed in the last few years to I started at UMBC. Right when ArcGIS Pro came out. And a lot of people had some issues with that transition longterm users. But I think ArcGIS Pro is a little more user friendly than ArcMap was. I think that's been a little bit of a help, too. And then I've also been introduced to all these great open source tools since starting at UMBC as well.

Dennise Cardona  4:51  
Fantastic to hear. That's great. My husband was a geography major in his undergrad and he dealt a lot with the ArcMap. Is that what you said? Yeah, that's it. He did, He dealt a lot with ArcMap. I heard that term thrown around quite a bit when he was in his studies. Now, how has your experience in the in taking the courses for GIS here at UMBC? How is that contributed right now to your professional growth and maybe skill development in the GIS sphere?

Joe Gallagher  5:21  
I feel like I got a crash course. And I got I got the starter pack for for being a data analyst in the last couple years. Starting with just maps GS 666, which is one of the required courses for the Masters. That was my first introduction to doing basic data analysis, I didn't even realize I was doing it at the time. But the first couple weeks of that class, you're using a programming language called R to do some data processing and transformation to calculate some new measures to aggregate some data. And at the time, I found that really challenging and frustrating and scary. And I struggle a lot with coding and things like that. But I stayed on board because like the overall principles of trying to make good maps, I was like, okay, cool. This is, you know, having good data is going to help me make a better map later. So I need to do a good job here. And coding provides me with this good brag breadcrumb trail that I can follow and figure out what I did, right or wrong. So it was a little bit of a struggle, but I felt like I got through. So that was like my first kind of intro to data analysis. And then I took building spatial data sets a newer course in last fall. And that was like, more of that basically. And I started getting savvier with, with those tools with our with being able to process large amounts of data quickly. And then for presentation on a map. And then and then I really leveled up when I was in another class that I think is outside the major. But it's another GIS class that's offered to undergrads and grad students at UMBC with Maggie Holland. That was the first time where I was like, Oh, these tools that I've learned in these other classes can help me do this project faster. We weren't required to use R or other like programmatic open source tools in that class. But I was like, Wait, this is gonna make the work way easier. It's either process, the hand processing and copying, pasting on spreadsheets, or I can do this with code. And I elected to do it ladder, and I found it much easier. And so yeah, I actually didn't even I wasn't even, I still felt like a novice. And I still am very much like a novice, but I was approached to interview with the FTA. And in that interview, a lot of the technical questions were like stuff, things I felt very comfortable talking about was like, how would you join two sets of data together, talk about the challenges if you tried to do that joint, and there was no primary key between them? These are very basic technical questions that you would learn and like any of your first GIS classes like and that has, that's remain true. A lot of my, a lot of the most challenging things I encounter in my job are like, trying to merge together messy data, trying to find data sources, and analyze them alongside each other. And then calculating percentages and things like that, too. That's another thing is I have never been a math person. And a lot of the math that you do when you get into the realm of spatial stats, it's a little more complex. But most of the work as a data analyst you do is like calculating percentages, calculating means. And that's something that anybody can do. So yeah, I felt like yeah, I got the data analyst starter pack with some of the courses and the GIS programming NBC, for sure. 

Dennise Cardona  8:53  
Yeah, it sounds like without those courses, do you think you would have done as well, on that interview? Do you feel like you would have had the be able to answer those questions as thought provoking? As you did? And?

Joe Gallagher  9:05  
No, definitely I would have, I still would have had a sense of like, how to join together data and stuff like that. But I wouldn't have known any of the tools that I would have used to do that I wouldn't have had very good answers at all. And I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have been able to talk conceptually about things and I wouldn't have been able to talk about how I deployed, like those tools in class projects and things like that. I, yeah, the coursework, definitely the courses, you know, the coursework you do in the courses along with the projects that I've done to have definitely all contributed to my I don't know my work now at the FDA for sure. 

Dennise Cardona  9:44  
Fantastic. As someone who has taken classes in the GIS program at UMBC, could you talk about maybe any concerns or reservations that you had before taking these courses? Maybe in your concern that Would you be able to deal with them? Would they be too easy, too difficult to be able to blend in with what you were doing currently? Did you have any of those reservations beforehand? And if so, how have they evolved since then?

Joe Gallagher  10:12  
I would say I like pretty much all those concerns, like, I, I worry that I'm not a very, like, technically savvy person yet, this is gonna be like, really hard for me, or like, the people in the class are gonna be like, way ahead of me, and have way more knowledge of this stuff than I do. But then the other I also was, like, worried about rigor. And I was like, but if it's not challenging, and it's not too hard for me, Well, it'd be like, useful enough. And I found that no, like, I pretty quickly got into the flow of things, I think it helps to have a little bit of a little bit of like, basic computer know how, which I do have, and many people do have. And then yeah, and then relating, will I be able to, will this be useful to me? And in my research answers and stuff like that, I think, I think these tools can be useful to anybody, whether you are in the field of geography, or you're just somewhere else in the social sciences, or you're more in the realm of public policy. I think they're the courses are can be can open up to you and the data sources in your respective field. Yeah, yeah, definitely have those concerns going in, but have them assuaged as time went on.

Dennise Cardona  11:26  
Glad to hear that. Are there any specific aspects of the GIS industry or applications that you are particularly passionate about? And how is the program helping you to explore those interests, if so?

Joe Gallagher  11:41  
Yeah. I am really into R, R spatial, so everyone, I had no idea what the heck R was before I started at UMBC. But R is a programming language that's about 30 years old, primarily used for statistical analysis by academics, but has increasingly been adopted over the years in wider applications. And R, the R, it's an open source communities, people build tools for and share for no costs. And it's a really great agnostic system for handling all sorts of data, including spatial data. And my work at FCA, I'd say like working with spatial data is only like 10% of what I do, like 90% of what I do is working with stuff that you would more commonly see presented as a spreadsheet. And so the kind of R programming universe is something I'm like very passionate about. So like, real novice when it comes to that stuff. But what I learned more and more like what the community of developers who work on products, or R is working on, I got like super excited. I was actually at the Transportation Research Board conference this week, and got to meet one of the people who works on some amazing R and then Python products. So that was really cool. And then so R, you can do any kind of data analysis in R. And you can build software in R. And then you can also even make maps within R all with lines of code. And that's really exciting. For a lot of reasons. Like I said, I've been talking about the kind of open source community that plugs you into an all the amazing tools of the developed. It also makes you look at data and like a completely different way, if you've only if you're only encounters with data analysis have been like with Excel, or just like looking at charts in like a newspaper or something like that. You're only seeing like the tip of the iceberg. Like when you actually handle data with R, you really have to like learn what's going on with the data set all the different data types that are contained within it. And then all the different challenges that that may be presented when working with the data programmatically. That's been really cool. And again, something I had no idea about before I started the program. But now that it, now it's like an incredibly important part of my toolset. And then a lot of what I worry about the work I do still winds up in ArcGIS just because that's a really popular tool in the federal government. But yeah, but a lot of the behind the scenes work I do once that is done in R. Yep, so R is like one thing I've been, it's been an exciting encounter with the program.

Dennise Cardona  14:20  
What has been your greatest takeaway from this program?

Joe Gallagher  14:25  
My greatest segue from the UMBC GIS program is that anyone can become a data analyst. If you are someone you took someone like me who's I've always had my nose in books. And I always thought that the best way to get data was to just talk to people and observe. Even if you're that kind of person are like the UMBC GIS program. Our program can teach you ways to systematically do those things and then connect those things to a whole wider universe of data. And then create beautiful, like maps and other deliverables from that. So that's a major takeaway. And I think anyone who's like looking to get into data analysis as a career, which I think is a great career path for a lot of people, this program definitely will give you the tools to get there. And I would just recommend come in with some strong passions already. Because the program isn't going to give you those you got to bring that to the table, but it's going to give you the tools to explore things that you're passionate about and that you have questions about so come with lots of questions about things. The program will connect you to the tools and data sources you need to to work with them and and learn more about what you're passionate about. Yeah.

Dennise Cardona  15:42  
Great, practical advice for everything for life for this program for everything. Joe, thanks so much for sharing those insights today with us. Thanks everyone else for tuning into this episode of UMBC's Mic'd up podcast. If you'd like to learn more about our offerings, do a search for UMBC GIS graduate program or simply click the link in the description.