The Department’s Senior Artist Susanna Baumgart took emergency medical leave last October and has yet to return, but new pictures and news items keep appearing on our bulletin boards, clever and creative flyers continue to announce Geography events, and our web site is constantly edited and updated. The credit for this continuation of Geography’s “graphic user interface” goes to two outstanding undergraduates, Laura Harrison and Maral Tashjian. Now both in their senior year and majoring in Geography, Laura and Maral were hand-picked by Susanna in 2004 for an “internship in digital graphics.” The original internship offered one unit of credit for each 30 hours of work. Laura and Maral eventually maxed out the number of credits they could use and, while they were both happy to continue to work on a volunteer basis, they are now on the payroll as undergraduate Student Assistants. We’re fortunate to have such dedicated, enthusiastic, and talented students in the Department.
Laura Harrison
Remember the classy poster advertising Stuart Sweeney’s class on The Geography of Surfing for Spring 2005? How about all those clever 2004/2005 Colloquium posters? They are all samples of Laura Harrison’s considerable skill and creativity as a graphic artist. “I’ve been doing graphic arts work for the Geography Dept for a year now as well, designing colloquium flyers and any other requested posters. I love the feeling when I finish a poster and can actually hold creativity in my hands. It’s a major self-esteem booster too, because I get to see my artwork everyday when I walk through Ellison’s halls! I give my warmest thank you to artist Susanna Baumgart for finding talent in me and giving encouragement to last a lifetime.”
Laura is a Coordinator of the Associated Students Recycling Program: “I love my job: the student-run, student-funded program is responsible for a major part of the waste diversion on campus; I help manage it and educate the community on the importance of taking responsibility for our environmental impact.” She also will be attending the UCSB Washington D.C. Program this fall, interning with the Nuclear Program at the Natural Resource Defense Council: “I’ll be working on several major GIS projects over the quarter; one using GIS to determine the environmental impact of United States testing of nuclear weapons. I’m excited to work with the NRDC, as it is a top-notch research organization and is highly influential in guiding national policy and protecting Earth’s valuable resources for generations to come. I’ll get to use some of the highest quality remotely sensed images and GIS technologies, while gaining real world experience with issues that are very important to me. I’ll also be doing research of my own on the side, probably based on my NRDC projects.”And she’s also promised to continue creating our flyers and posters, in her “spare time.”
Maral Tashjian
“An exceptionally talented student”; “a superior sense of graphic design and visual communication”; “very hard working, self-motivated, reliable, and a good team player”; “a great sense of humor”; “a pleasure to work with”; “more mature and responsible than most if not all her peers.” Yep, Maral Tashjian is a keeper.
Of Armenian descent, Maral came to the US four years ago, having lived in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Lebanon most of her life. Her interests include music (she plays the piano and used to play the drums in an orchestra), art (drawing, painting, digital graphics), photography, and, of course, Geography. Maral is in charge of the Department’s photo shoots, she creates our portrait galleries and maintains our bulletin boards, she updates our web pages, including the Earth Gate site, and she creates miscellaneous art work for faculty and the Department.
“How did I get into Geography? I started out interested in urban planning/design and then transportation. I coordinated an Education for Sustainable Living class for two quarters on Sustainable Transportation with Dr. Goulias as the Faculty Advisor—we even worked a bit with MTD on some issues. I’m also really interested in cartography—had an internship and now work part time job with Maps.com.”Maral is also a research assistant for the NSF funded project “Animeye” (eye-movement analyses of dynamic geovisualization displays) that is run by Sara Fabrikant.
Laura and Maral have several things in common: they’re both artistic, they’re both skilled at computer graphics, they both excel academically, they’re both enthusiastic about Geography, and they both devote a lot of their time to humanitarian causes. There’s an old saying that if you want a job done, give it to a busy person—and a lot of us in the Department have learned that if you want a job done well, particularly in the realm of digital graphics, you give it to Laura or Maral!
