Spring Insight is an annual UCSB open house which showcases all the university has to offer to admitted and prospective UCSB students and their families. This year’s event took place on Saturday, April 14, 9 am – 3 pm, and it featured campus sessions, fairs, and tours designed to cover all aspects of undergraduate life at UCSB. The Department of Geography made its presence conspicuous by creating a freestanding poster for the occasion, and undergraduate Geography major Felicia Bill generously donated her time to man our academic information booth during the event:
“Representing our department at Spring Insight this past weekend was a challenge as Geography is often overlooked by prospective students as a lucrative or worthwhile field of study due to its association with tediously learning place names in grade school. Although we had arguably the best decor with our giant globe and poster, I was most often approached by parents who stopped at every table or by people wanting directions from a geographer. We were also given an unfortunate location and many students passed right in front of me as they exclaimed, “Wow! Brain Science!” in reference to the table next to ours.
There was, however, a handful of young students with a love for maps and atlases that was genuinely curious about the Geography Department here at UCSB. To these students, I highlighted the interdisciplinarity within our department, our impressive NRC ranking, and how virtually anything that takes place in space can be related back to geography. I talked about the neat things we can do in ENVI and ArcGIS, as well as some of my current projects, which include modeling retreat of the Himalayan Gangotri glacier, landslide events in the Santa Ynez Mountains, and my work at the Map & Imagery Laboratory. It was a great experience to show students and parents what our department has to offer and the boundless opportunities available to us with a degree in Geography and GIS.”
“I am a relatively new Geography student as I transferred into the program just before Fall quarter of this year, so most or all of my geography-related activities have been very recent. Fall quarter, I was working at the Graduate Division and held an internship with Jim Caesar at Environmental Health and Safety making stat boards for emergency operations and an interactive KML that simulated this program we are learning for the county, WebEOC. I also worked extensively with Mo Lovegreen, Katie Maynard, and Ryan Kelley on the national (somewhat international) sustainability tracking program, STARS, where we sifted through tons of data and statistics on the sustainability of the physical, administrative and academic elements of our campus operations. At the end of the quarter, I began working at the Map and Imagery Laboratory as a GIS technician, making maps for their Aerial Photography Digital Index. Spring quarter, I obtained an internship with Keith Clarke and made several maps for the International Students and Scholars Division of Student Affairs that displayed data on the locations of the EAP students’ host countries, as well as the nations of students and scholars that UCSB currently hosts. I also was made the lead for the Sustainability Layer Team for the Interactive Campus Map (progress still pending).
I attended the AAG Conference to support my friends Seth Gorelik and Stephanie Truitt as they both had poster presentations, as well as for networking purposes and enjoyment. My recent travels to Southeast Asia came about as my colleague, Mark O’Connor who is also in the GIS program, was studying at Thammasat University in Bangkok. He was doing research on Islam/Muslim populations in Thailand and wanted to make maps for his department, so we collaborated on the project and produced several. I ended up creating a shapefile of all of the Thai provinces (changwat) and attribute data supplied by the university from scratch. A few of my larger projects including these Thailand maps can be viewed here. This quarter, I am continuing work on the internship with EH&S, where we will be developing the interface of WebEOC for our campus and possibly training the county to use it. I am also doing a 176C project using stream channel and reservoir data from Jeff Dozier of the Bren School as well an independent project in the 115C course studying glacial retreat in the Himalayas.”
Editor’s note: Many thanks to Felicia for her generous outreach efforts on behalf of the Department and for providing the details for this article; thanks also to Jose Saleta for helping to man the booth. Felicia’s impressive resume can be found here.
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