All Teched Out

Most of you know that I have a degree in Anthropology which is a Bachelor's of Arts. I've always hated that it was simply a Bachelor's of Arts. Liberal Arts degrees tend to get a very bad rep; people like us are looked down upon since we didn't have to take all the heavy science and maths that the Engineers, Chemists, Business, etc had to take. I decided though that I wanted to prove that you CAN go somewhere with a Liberal Arts degree that doesn't require you to eat Ramen noodles and live out of your car.

I went the corporate route; I work for a Government Contracting firm that focuses on IT, IT Security, and GIS. I write contract proposals, and do recruiting for them while going to Grad School for Geospatial Information Science (GIS) which is in fact a technical degree. I'm still in the realm of anthropology and archeology sort of. Even if I don't technically use my degree in my job, having that background was the best thing I could've done for myself. My perspective on the world is much different than someone who simply took a lot of science and math. Don't get me wrong those are good as well, which is why at Penn State you're required to take a handful of everything to make you well rounded.

My Masters that I'm working on now is HEAVY technical stuff. Currently I'm in a Programming and Scripting class that I have to say is quite tough. I have an A in the class right now but it's a struggle. A lot of time is spent looking up coding and researching concepts (since unfortunately my prof isn't that great of a teacher, very smart but can't explain things very well). The skills that I will take away from this class though will be extremely helpful.

The next class I will take will be Spatial Databases which is once again a very tech heavy class. It focuses on creating the databases behind those maps that I love. It will incorporate a lot of different tools that I used in the first two classes and I'm excited to get started with it.

Basically I'm extremely happy with the route I'm taking. I'm not sure if I'll actually move on to a position where I'll solely be working on Geospatial work or if I'll stay in the writing field. Either way the knowledge gained from starting with an Arts degree and then moving onto a Tech degree is infinitely useful. After I'm done with my Masters though I still have to decide what I want to get my PhD in. Currently I'm leaning towards something in writing but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.