Remote, sick, and employment

Montage of madness is the only way to describe my current events...

Ben was hit hard by a plague/cold/kiss of death last week, which inevitably decided to take turns with me this week. Not the best of timing, as I had some hardcore job interviews lined up. Should've expected that though. Doesn't it seem only like my classic good-luck that I would come down with this plague right when I resume my ever-eventful search for that next post-grad step? Naturally.

Anyways, I (definitely) know I'm better off then some in this economy. Having said that, I definitely won't resort to whining about my current career prospects (especially since I do currently have a steady, if not well-paying, gig...with the much needed at the moment health-insurance) . However, I must admit it's hard to sum up where I feel like I fit in (career-wise) at this point. I hold a Master's in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, but my interests and training go very beyond the job offerings of those fields. So, honestly, as I sit here punching away at my C.V. trying to define and redefine that "career objective", the next step is very unclear and ambiguous to me.

I think, the heart of my problem here is what I studied and how I studied it. To be specific, I spent a healthy bulk of my time in grad school learning and perfecting my remote sensing skills. I liked what I learned about the field, and definitely would like to carry it over to industry if I could (where I could learn more without going further into grad debt). However, unfortunately, most of the remote sensing positions I'm interested in are more leaning more towards candidates with hard-core programming experience (we are talking the C++ hard core coder engineers). This appears to be true even if they don't mention it in their recruiting ads. For example: a very interesting SF carbon start-up called Terra Global, seemed by their job description to fit me very well (ENVI experience? Check. Supervised and unsupervised land classification? Check Check. Biomass inventory and forestry work? CHECK!!!). In fact, I actually got a call back for an interview (EXCITEMENT!!)....but unfortunately, they hired someone before my interview turn came around (bummer.). I sent my usual "I understand, please keep me informed of opportunities, and P.S. how could I improve to meet your needs(?)", and got a very polite letter from the managing director explaining that though I definitely had a strong developing remote sensing skill set, I still lacked the hard languages background and programming experience he thought were necessary (also, he added, "was I interested in consulting offers(?)").

And so the story goes....

I'd definitely be lying if I didn't say that I felt like my minimal programming experience was a weakness of mine, and a hinderance in getting into the hard core remote sensing stuff. Both my geography and (definitely) my environmental planning background did not place any sort of emphasis on programming talents. What I do know are mostly sub-languages like SQL and Visual Basic, (which are more handy for heavily-GUI'd packages like ESRI GIS and Microsoft Access)...and those skills I mostly picked up from doing database work.

Problem with remote sensing is that it is a very hard skill set to develop outside of very elite academic institutions. The software is very cost prohibited (Definiens licenses can run 7500-10,000) . ENVI isn't much better (4,000-6,000). Even with educational discounts, many institutions just find it too darn expensive to provide for their students. Also, there is the instructor problem. The few professors with the professional aptitude and intellectual interest for teaching remote sensing (i.e. which, I find, requires an unusual combo of atmospheric physics, geostatistics, computer science, and geospatial training) rarely, if ever, have the technical programming aspects down. That particular widget of info is delegated to either a T.A. (recruited, most likely, from a department outside of Geography and Planning... usually in the electrical engineering/computer science ranks)...or just ignored all together. As a result, many remote sensing classes are more entrenched in teaching the "statisticals and the theoreticals" of the field, rather then practicing with the latest software and learning the necessary computational techniques (as I personally found to be the case with my earliest remote sensing classes at Berkeley...which is why I started taking classes at Davis later in the game).

At the end of the day, I think my only option for really boosting my resume to offer the remote sensing skills that company's (like Terra Global) require is going back to grad school. Not just any grad school either, but an "elite" program, like UCSB Geography or UC Davis. I can't say the prospect of doing that really thrills me at the moment...especially since I'm so exhausted after jumping through the hoops at my last program. However, in my (at this point, very real,) feverish delirium of where my career is pointing me, I am becoming very aware of something I wasn't aware of before I applied for that legendary master's of landscape architecture and environmental planning.

This summer, while en-route to new career paths, I've been taking the time to talk to some like-minded undergrads who want to transition their theoretical geographical background into a landscape architecture or environmental planning career. This of course makes sense for them to do, since the program that I just jumped hoops through was a Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning program (and ranked #2 or #3 last time I heard), and well...it (*seems) like I'm actually currently employed in it (I say 'seems' because I think my actual workload has transcended the limits of the typical architecture & planning education several times).

I've got to admit, just by looking for jobs, you begin to realize that Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning are very broad (and sometimes, very separate) fields. There are also many career paths in them. However, one common theme I'm struck by (as I am busy scouting the job market and advising new recruits) is how many environmental planning and landscape management firms are really starting to thinking about the "big" picture. The scale and the scope of the assignments out there have grown. People are not turning to landscape architects and environmental planners to ask how to best plant their garden, or manage their local creek. They are now turning to landscape architects and environmental planners to ask how to stop global warming, or fix the multitude of ailments of entire watersheds.

I feel like my graduate program openly embraced these large scale questions, but did not have many classes addressing what tools are necessary and how to work at such a comprehensive and holistic scale. GIS, CAD and hand drawing were the typical 'tools-of-trade' taught in my program. Remote sensing was entirely ignored by the students and the professors...and anyone interested in it (like me) had to go far outside of the department to find the training and resources. CAD and hand-drawings, only really useful for fine-scale design rather then large scale analysis, left GIS as the only pathway for understanding these large scale questions. Frankly, I think that's a bad thing. GIS data is progressively moving further away from being files captured by ground-based instruments (i.e. GPS, weather/water gauges, etc) and more closely to being files generated by large-scale models and from high-resolution imagery. This is not to say that there isn't a place or use for ground-based data (definitely, it is necessary to have it to be capable of validating accuracy in all image and model dependent data), it's just to say that more and more the vector and raster layers we use in GIS are somehow tied to a science that most landscape architects and environmental planners have no training or familiarity with.

GIS, for all it's merits, can be an exceptionally dangerous thing in the hands of the ill-informed. With the plethora of (mostly free) data out there, it's all too easy to add a bunch of data layers and make pretty maps of large scale phenomenon that really have no basis in logic or reality. With the multitude of pressures my colleagues face (from development deadlines, to permitting applications, to the competitive bid processes), I see too much of this "pretty map making" and very little logical thought process behind the "map making". The emphasis almost always seems to be placed on making the map look "good" as oppose to making it make sense.

A wise-teacher once told me that the methodology of properly adding, modifying, and modeling GIS layers is intrinsically dependent on how the information was gathered, by what source, and for what purpose. Since much of this large-scale GIS information is now coming to 'us' (i.e. landscape architects and environmental planners) via satellite feed and computer simulations, it's important for us to be able to interpret how these remote process work and what laws they obey. You simply can't learn that by blithely adding GIS output data layers at your whimsy till they assemble the pretty patterns of your mind. It's just utter ignorance to do such, and raging stupidity to present such information under the deceiving visual guise of a "fact-based" map.

I can definitely respect landscape architects and environmental planners for the scale and scope of their vision....but unless their information comes to me in the form of a clear, methods based, map product...I have little hope that their information will actually accomplish large-scale change or actually answer the large-scale issues they endeavor to address.

So, to all the new landscape and planning recruits with big-lollipop dreams of solving the next global crisis, I find I'm leaving them with this advice (advice, that I dearly hope all the wall street investors are taking into account these days): diversify yourself. Take the time outside your program to learn the source and makings of your data. Venture out of that GIS box, and meet up with the raw source, data, and code. Yeah, it's tricky...and it sure isn't what they are advising you to do right now in your program, but trust me, it will make you think better. Even with 3 years of remote sensing training under my belt, I truly believe I understand the logic (and deception) of geospatial maps better then ever before. As a result I also believe I understand the large-scale issues and their influences better then before.

Of course, there is a lot for even me to still learn (which takes us back to the top). Ideally, I'd hope to learn this on the job, but realistically, it might not be possible without further education. However, at the moment, I'm going to keep plodding (or wandering...depending on which day of the week it is) on this subject...because someday, I believe, my ability to know the source of the problem will enable me to make a earnest attempt in solving it.

::steps off puplit and heads to the sneezing room for more sudafed:::

Co-op day-ze....

(Summer 2003, Ridge House)

It's been a little over 2 months since I've left the Berkeley Student Cooperative system (formerly the USCA), that was my Berkeley home for over 5 years (with one gap year in between).

Now living as an urban nomad (aka subletter) I'm coming to terms with how much the co-op system did to help me feel at home in the Bay Area. As a nervous college student leaving my parents SoCal ranch for the "great hippie joint" to the North, I wasn't very prepared for adjusting to Bay Area life. Nobody in my immediate family or friend circle had ever moved away from home to go to college (...of those few who had gone to college). Dorm-life wasn't an experience that my mother could explain to me, and 12-years of "taking care of animals before school work" had definitely left me ill-prepared for the academic feeding frenzy known as U.C. Berkeley.

The best I could do was take some fashion advice from my model/suburbanite best friend Kellie, and hope to god that 2-years of community college and vocational upbringing had some useful relevance in the Bay Area.

I hit a lot of speed bumps, both academically and socially, those first few years at Cal. Mercifully, in my very first semester, I fell into a co-op household of people who were as kind as they were forgiving for my shortcomings (aka Ridge House). After that first semester at Ridge, I knew that as long as I was a student at Cal, I would remain in the co-op's. It was my main way of making friends and picking up the "outside-of-class" information you need to know to survive college-- and Cal in particular (for example: I couldn't afford to travel up for formal first-year orientation, so my Ridge housemates showed me how to use the college email/library accounts...which I would've never figured out without them).

Of course, not every co-op I lived in turned out to be as great as Ridge (namely the graduate co-op, the Convent, was my most negative co-op experience). However, I did take away something from each co-op I tried (and in total, I tried 3 houses and 2 apartments). I also picked up management roles towards the end (including Board Rep, Waste Mgr, and Secretary).

The co-op's and their residents taught me more then I could possibly express in a brief blog. It was Cal and the promise of an elite education that made my journey to the Bay Area necessary, however it was the co-op's that made the stay in the Bay Area worthwhile and rewarding.

For all you did, BSC: Thank you.

New Dawn, New Blog

NYC, August 6, 2006.


It was time.

I've had blogs in the past, which I'll keep active just for the sake of memories and old friends, but...I needed something new. Google-new.

To be honest, I haven't been keeping up with blogging in about...3 years? Roughly around the time I started grad school. In the past, my blogs were usually humorous (in my own mind) rants and worried soliloquies about being a student and my never-ending field work. My blogging adolescence. Fresh with uncomfortable grammar errors and acne scars. Not terribly proud of that stage, but it had to be lived.

This blog is wearing it's big-girl Google pampers though. It's going to talk about the geospatial technologies I'm working on (or hoping to work on), my freelance writing career (or lack thereof), some field and outback adventures, my efforts and reflections on recovering from a very chilling graduate school experience (at last, I have completed my master's), and my on-going work with the Oakland students and their pollution crusade.

I'll have my official website up soon, so I won't waste time on the background news. Suffice to say, each of these projects are in their seperate jars, bobbing blithely to different destinations.

In closing, a remembrance to christen the effort and honor the ominpresent vacancy of one beloved grandfather.

Aftermath

9 pm,
and the shoes are still warm,
of flesh and sun,
by the porch which has lost all it's moorings.
Above our heads: the cracks of little tile earthquakes,
and I'm still awake,
unsettled on wanting a cup of coffee.

The chimes are still dialing at their best,
to the sound of the world:
a dial tone, disconnected.
The casualties of erupting silence,
have put the burning mountains on hold.

Everywhere something to pick up,
A button thread, a root, a place.
But the sun itself has set too low,
and the stars have been lying to the compass.

Here: the last structure stands,
a passage of time erected.
And, yes yes yes,
we shall all live on:
in hour long minutes
waiting for the calls
of birds, long lost in the wind.