‘Tis the season… of admissions to graduate programs and I want to share the call for applications to the MSA program that I am sending to colleagues across Canada :
I am emailing colleagues who have provided reference letters and advice to students from their institutions applying to our Master of Spatial Analysis (MSA) program. We are always very grateful for your assessments and I would like to thank you personally for the time and effort spent speaking with your students about graduate school and writing those letters.
I would be grateful if you would again recommend the MSA program to your senior undergraduate students. The program homepage at http://www.ryerson.ca/graduate/programs/spatial/ contains relevant information for prospective applicants. Graduate funding is provided based on incoming qualifications, research interests, and time of application – first-consideration deadline is January 13th, 2013.
The MSA program is an intense one-year program with strong connections to potential employers in the Toronto area, as well as a rigorous research component. A range of research themes, in which MSA graduates have recently published or presented, are listed below. Also listed are additional areas of interest of potential MSA supervisors.
Recent graduates were employed by major retailers and banks (e.g., Canadian Tire, McDonald’s, Walmart; RBC, Scotiabank); environmental and health agencies (e.g., Ministry of Environment, TRCA; St.Michael’s Hospital, Toronto Public Health), police services, GIS vendors, and spatial data producers, or they are pursuing further graduate degrees (including MBAs and PhDs).
Thank you for forwarding this call to your students.
Kind regards,
Claus
Selection of recently published MSA research by field of study:
ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS:
– lake and river sediment contamination
– wildfire modeling
– land-use change detection
– the urban heat island
– urban reforestation
– renewable energy site selection
BUSINESS GEOMATICS:
– Canadian retail trends
– consumer segmentation
– the effect of business improvement areas
– spatial patterns of TV consumption
SOCIAL/COMMUNITY APPLICATIONS (incl. HEALTH, CRIME):
– access to primary health care
– newcomer health services planning
– local news coverage
– food deserts
– the geospatial web
– public participation GIS
(See details at http://www.ryerson.ca/graduate/programs/spatial/publications.html.)
Additional areas of interest of potential supervisors include:
– agent-based modeling, self-organizing maps
– economic geography
– environmental justice
– ethnic retail
– geographic visualization
– immigration and settlement patterns
– neighbourhood wellbeing indices
– real-estate valuation
– transportation planning
(See also http://www.ryerson.ca/graduate/programs/spatial/faculty.html for program faculty members.)