Starting college was a rough time for me. Graduating from high school in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic left me with a lot of uncertainty as to how I wanted to apply my interests to a higher academic and career level. I knew I wanted to major in something mathematics-related, but I wasn't sure what to choose. I wanted to start as a Mathematics major, then had a fleeting interest in Engineering. At the last minute, I switched to majoring in Accounting, which served as an exploratory stopgap; I wasn't quite sure if it was something I wanted or was interested in, but it was at least something.
Being an Accounting major was fine for a few semesters, but I was unsure about my future career if I were to continue with it. I enjoyed the challenges that came with the academic side of accounting, but I wasn't particularly looking forward to basing a future career off of it. My interest in Data Science started when my Accounting advisor suggested a Data Science minor. I was hesitant at first; my course load was already fairly difficult, and I wasn't sure if I could fit it in with all of the classes Accounting required, but I decided to try Data Science 1 over J-Term.
I was nervous to start Data Science at first. I had close to no programming experience, and I assumed that the field required some amount of prior experience to get into, but my professor presented the content in a way that was both easy to understand for someone with little programming experience and made me eager to learn more about it. The combination of my dissatisfaction with Accounting and my newfound interest in this new field led me to change my major to Data Science. The more I continued through my Data Science degree requirements, the more I loved the major; It had the level of difficulty I liked from Accounting combined with the ability to be applied to a wide variety of fields through the various tools and programming languages it included, such as R and Python 3.
While considering my selections for my concentration, I recalled a class I took as a placeholder while I was an accounting major, GEO 1610 Introduction to Geographic Information Science, which started a passing hobby at the time. Once I remembered how I enjoyed working with cartography and geospatial data, I decided to construct my Data Science concentration around learning more about the field of Geographic Information Science. As I continued my concentration, I grew to enjoy it even more. I found that working with geographical information was a consistent interest of mine, and I realized that I may be able to take that enjoyment and focus it into a career that I would enjoy.
My first experience with working with GIS data in a nearly non-academic was during the final class in my concentration, GEO 3610 Applied Projects in GIS. Over the duration of that course, I worked on two tasks for external clients. The first project aimed to determine the percentage of filled parking spots on a campus parking lot. It heavily utilized deep learning to train and utilize an object detection model to detect vehicles in an aerial photo, utilizing visible light and near-infrared bands to differentiate cars from their surroundings. The second project involved identifying an area for an international environmental consulting firm that was previously contaminated with high levels of chemicals that were deemed as toxic. This involved deriving a 3-dimensional scene from a dataset and delineating a zone in which contaminant levels exceeded certain thresholds.
Overall, my academic career path turned out nothing like I envisioned it going in during my freshman year. Even though my first few years of college had some stopgap solutions to figure out where my interests laid, I'm glad I was able to find a field I enjoyed through the courses at Carthage College.