We live in a society in which those with rare, unusual gifts rise to the top. Think of the brilliance of Stephen Hawking or the ephemeral beauty of the latest Hollywood star. However, we never give a second thought to the outstanding farmer or the successful business manager. The only difference between those people and the ones that we admire is that their abilities are spread out. These are the type of people who have gotten humanity through generations of hardship and whose skills are adequate in many areas.
In high school, I floundered. I didn’t know who I was or where I wanted to go. A wonderful counselor suggested that I take some aptitude tests, and we found out that really, I wasn’t outstanding at anything. On the other hand, I was strong at many things.
My attraction to Geography was based on the variety of tasks that it required. Deep quantitative and qualitative analysis? We do that. Operating equipment? We do that as well. Working indoors and outdoors? Yup. Working with individuals, informal groups, organizations, or nobody at all? All of those are available. Being in a field where I am useful in so many different ways is golden.
Out of all my interests, two really caught my interests. I found computers fascinating. Being able to automate things and to produce high quality products was especially attractive to me. My other love was Cartography. Taking numbers and making them understandable in a different way is so important to me. The choice of Geographic Information Systems as a career has been a good choice, although I still need some hands-on work to satisfy my artistic side. Working in GIS, I get to be a “Generalists Generalist.” One day, I might be creating a paper geology map, and the next, I might be analyzing traffic flows for a interactive web map. Some people are poplar trees, growing as high as possible, and others like me are junipers, growing outward to cover as much ground as possible.
I’ve been told that I’m not a “computational thinker.” I’ve met some of those outstanding people who can organize a series of 20 tasks into logical order in their heads, or who can look at a spreadsheet of 500 numbers and see in it a picture of how a business is doing. However, the ability of a cartographer to take abstract data and produce a coherent picture out of it is something that I do understand and do well.
It’s been said that a good cartographer has the ability to transmit an incredible amount of information directly into the mind of a map reader. Consider how long it takes to read a written travelogue of a foreign country. Then think about how long it takes to gain a similar amount of understanding from a well drawn map. This is why the “art” in Cartography is important.