Mamata Akella (BA, 2006) is alive and well at Pennsylvania State University and recently sent the Department the letter below describing her first year as a grad student in Geography. You may remember Mamata as the 2006 winner of the Jack & Laura Dangermond Undergraduate Scholarship which is awarded to the most accomplished undergraduate student in Geographic Information Systems in the department of Geography. Mamata is also responsible for the 2006 establishment of The Akella Family Scholarship which is funded by her parents. The scholarship is awarded each year to talented and deserving undergraduate student(s) enrolled in the department and is used to support undergraduate student(s) based on the criteria of compelling family/personal circumstances and academic achievement.
Hello UCSB Geography,
I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the summer! Since I left UCSB almost a year ago, I have been keeping busy with all things geography. I started my master’s degree at Penn State in the fall of 2006 and my advisor is Cindy Brewer. In the fall, I was a TA for remote sensing, and, spring semester, I was an RA for Alan MacEachren working on a project called the Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas. Penn State is in a small town in central Pennsylvania called State College. It is pretty crazy because Penn State is a huge University, not only area wise but student population wise as well. There are 40,000 (yes, 40,000) undergraduate students and approximately 5,000 master’s and PhD students. When there is a football game at Penn State, State College becomes the third largest city in Pennsylvania. The stadium alone seats around 109,000 people and tailgating is a form of art. When I first moved there I was lucky to attend a game with alumni of both Penn State and UCSB Ben Holland. Although we went to a game where it was raining the entire time, it was a lot of fun and you could feel the school spirit in the air.
I have learned a lot this past year and also survived my first real winter and first year of graduate school! Currently, I am interning at ESRI in Redlands, so I was able to come back to California for the summer. I am working with the cartographic research team. We are working on a Portland dataset and seeing how different kinds of information on maps behave as map scale changes. I actually just started this week, so the project is still fairly new to me! Although the town of Redlands isn’t much, working at ESRI is really neat. I am looking forward to getting some experience with 9.2, learning more about cartography and getting my research proposal written this summer.
It was really nice to see some of you at AAG in San Francisco, and I look forward to seeing you again in Boston. If any of you are ever in State College for any reason, get in touch with me!
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