Guest post by Nikita Markevich, BA in Geographic Analysis candidate, Ryerson University
As an international student, I was facing some bureaucratic hurdles obtaining an internship in Canada. However, my program, the BA in Geographic Analysis, requires the completion of 350 hours of work experience, usually on paid practicum placements in the private or public sector. Given the need to complete this requirement for timely graduation next spring, my attention shifted to my home country, Russia. I was able to arrange an internship with ESRI CIS, the Russian subsidiary of the world-leading Geographic Information Systems (GIS) vendor, ESRI Inc. The placement in Moscow was arranged through the help of networking and contacts I made during the 2015 International Geographical Union conference in Moscow, which I attended as well.
During my placement between May and July 2016, I have obtained valuable experience which shaped my sense of the work environment of a large GIS vendor. I was attached to the GIS specialist team and my supervisor helped me a lot on the first stages of my placement. I was introduced to my project, which involved creation of a massive geo-database coordinated by ESRI software packages, particularly ArcMap 10.2 and ArcCatalog 10.2. I was tasked with data mining routines, maintaining attribute tables and working with relational databases. The project focused on the transformation of polygonal data into a geo-database according to technical standards, which were set by a client.
Once the routine workflow was formed, ESRI offered me a choice of attending additional ESRI certified training courses, from which I completed two: ESRI ArcGIS 10.3 Essential Workflows and ESRI ArcGIS 10.3 Effective Editing. Both courses helped to solidify my skills in editing polygonal data and conduct analyses using geoprocessing tools. Working in an environment with experienced professionals in the GIS field, especially programmers involved in the creation of Web GIS scripts, helped me improve my GIS programming skills, including those, which facilitate and automate routines related to attribute information editing.
Overall, my summer internship at ESRI CIS allowed me to practice and deepen the essential skills of a GIS specialist, which will come as an asset in my employment search in Canada. I also spent some time exploring my hometown – visiting museums and suburbs – and traveling to the neighbouring Baltic countries Latvia and Estonia.