Help a Beginner

[u/Emergency-Trifle5253]

i'm starting college in a week and i chose to major in Geo Informatics, my university has a different approach to it by adding programming and basically teaching students the technical side to it. I chose this not because i like geography, but because i couldn't major in computer science and with the list of options i had, i think this is the closest major i could study that is closest to cs, although they are different, but because Geo Informatics offered computing courses like AI, Machine Learning and Data science, i thought this is good cuz now im specializing in a "sort of" CS field.
i want to become best of both worlds so i can get a job with a good pay roll, i'm intermediate in my cs side but have absolutely no clue about the programming side of GIS
any tips to make things clearer for me?
i grew interest in GIS after discovering it so i am willing to do whatever it takes.
i need tips on where to start with and how to start, make my foundation strong
i would appreciate it!

[u/Ladefrickinda89]

As a beginner, this suggestion may not make sense. But, it’s what my Intro to GIS professor told us.

“You all are in a course to learn about spatial science. Not geography, not maps, not where things are on a map. You will be learning about the science of why things are where they are”

My suggestion, learn to think spatially. Ask yourself. “What factors are driving that McDonalds to be at that intersection”.

Hope this helps, happy mapping

[u/Emergency-Trifle5253 → u/Ladefrickinda89]

this changed my perception on how to view this field, thank you

[u/Ok-Space-6041]

You are right to choose Geoinformatics when you couldn’t get CS. Many of my friends got CS and data science related jobs after graduating from Geoinformatics. I also chose the subject partly because I loved programming in my undergrad.

It’s fine if you don’t know anything about GIS. If you know CS stuff, especially programming, you are already at a better position. Many GIS students who have non-CS background or just don’t like programming are at a disadvantage I think. The GIS mostly relay on working with lots of data and automation. Without programming, it’s hard to get the level of flexibility in GIS software.

The way I see Geoinformatics is, it’s just information science (or data science) where the data is related to geography or have a real world aspect to it (off course there is more to the subject but majorly it’s this). Many people who work in the field just work with images (basically n-dimensional arrays) and vectors (basically a tabular data).

Now, about tips. Just try to understand the fundamentals of the topics, like how exactly satellites collect images or what exactly a vector is. Then everything else is just trying to answer some questions using these data.

Hope this helps and best of luck.

[u/Emergency-Trifle5253 → u/Ok-Space-6041]

thank you so much, i appreciate the tip!

[u/Subokuu6e]

I pivoted from CS to Geospatial in my postgrad and it’s overall been pretty transferable, especially with the python aspect.

[u/Emergency-Trifle5253 → u/Subokuu6e]

yeah, i checked the course work by my uni and most of it is just programming languages (of course GIS related but still aligns with CS pretty well). Makes sense that it's transferable

[u/True-Library-3622]

If your course provides access to the Esri stack of products (ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online) then I would recommend going through as many of the publicly available trainings as possible.

Make sure to learn the fundamentals of map making, understand the coordinate systems and why they differ, things like that.

[u/Emergency-Trifle5253 → u/True-Library-3622]

I'm not sure about Esri stack of products, but I do remember seeing ArcGIS somewhere in the course work. I'll keep that in mind, thank you for the tip

!