Internship Blog Post #1

The journey from a GIS Padawan to now has flown by. The journey to find an internship felt like an eternity of highs and lows. I only just signed paperwork to become an intern for my local county's GIS department. I still have orientation to attend (unknown date at this time), but hopefully I will have begun by the end of month. During the interview it was noted the Emergency Management office was hoping they had an intern to assist in the revamp of the 9-1-1 service in the county to an updated version. Then also helping in the GIS department with their daily tasks. It is a small room of 4 people, and they have even smaller offices with stacks of documents as high as their monitors on their desks. There is a big conference table in the middle of the room, which I will be seated at with a laptop and 2 large map printers shoved against the wall. I plan to earn credit by showing up, and working hard for them. I love to learn, so anything they can teach me I will soak in and I hope I can teach them things I know too. They are working with an older ArcGIS Desktop version, but none of them have any direct background in GIS college related courses such as the ones we have been taking the past year. I am thrilled at the opportunity and will not let it go to waste. Leave everything you touch better than you found it has been ingrained in me since I was a Girl Scout in primary school, so this chance should continue the tradition.

In the meantime this week, I joined a local GIS user group called Northeast Florida GIS User Group found at this link. They have a straight forward mission statement of to "provide an educational environment for Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) professionals and students, facilitate the advancement of geospatial initiatives, and the exchange of ideas". They accomplish this through a email mailing list and a LinkedIn account. I hope they provide some great information about this area I call home in the future.