-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        BORN to be a Geographer?
Date:   Fri, 8 Apr 2011 06:03:17 -0700 (PDT)
From:   Julie Lancelle <[log in to unmask]>
To:     [log in to unmask], Angie Cope <[log in to unmask]>



http://www.directionsmag.com/articles/born-to-be-a-geographer/173234


   Born to be a Geographer?

Thursday, April 7th 2011
4 Comments and 10 Reactions
<http://www.directionsmag.com/articles/born-to-be-a-geographer/173234#disqus_thread>


By Adena Schutzberg
<http://www.directionsmag.com/authors/adena-schutzberg/121733>
Read More About: geospatial technology
<http://www.directionsmag.com/tags/explore/geospatial+technology>

Summary: Many geographers working today tell stories about lying on the
floor as children carefully examining maps of the world and dreaming of
those places. Others recall idyllic car rides with a map across their
lap as they guided Mom or Dad to a vacation destination. Executive
Editor Adena Schutzberg did neither of those activities but was still
destined to be a geographer.

I used to think it was odd I ended up a geographer. I did not pore over
maps as a child or volunteer to read the AAA trip-tik on vacations with
my family. I didn’t particularly enjoy memorizing where all the
countries of Europe were in Mr. Hughes’ 8th grade social studies class.
But now I am realizing I was an observer of space even then; it was just
space on a larger scale.

Let’s start back in eighth grade. I recall my glee when I finally set up
my bedroom the way I liked it, and the way it would remain until I left
for college. I used my new and then very hip six-foot white bookcases to
create a barrier between the side of the room with my bed and the side
with my desk and bureau.

In high school I got my first real job as a “picker” at a ski clothing
warehouse during the summers. My job was to push a wheeled cart around
the huge floor and fulfill orders for different stores. It was
physically hard work done in ten hour shifts, four days on, four days
off, all summer. I was good at it; I was accurate and fast. I could look
down the order form and figure out how to get everything in one pass
from the back of the building to the front. I could figure out when it
made sense to drag the cart and when it was faster to leave the cart at
the end of the aisle and carry the turtlenecks in my arms. (Don’t tell
anyone, but my brother and I got paid a bit more than the other summer
help.)

I studied a large scale problem for my master’s thesis. I like to kid
around about the topic because I love the looks of astonishment I get.
Yes, I really did do my master’s research on the Penn State Blue Band.
The idea hit me like a rock one day as I wandered the halls of Walker
Building bemoaning my lack of a thesis topic well into my second year in
the department. First I realized that mapping out the marching band
members on the field was a geographic problem for the director. Then I
realized that making sense of the football field space was a geographic
problem for the musicians.

I even had a “transitional” job after I finished graduate school that
tapped my large scale spatial skills: I worked in the stockroom at Crate
and Barrel. I got to decide where everything went. I made sure the
really breakable stuff was better protected than the
not-quite-so-breakable stuff. When a salesperson came in for a dozen
more of those “snowman mugs” I knew exactly where they were and how many
we had. That large scale (small area) management was so intuitive, so
natural, so “fun.”

All that brings me up to the present where I continue, mostly
unconsciously so far as I can tell, to hone in on the challenges of
small areas. Over the last few months I’ve been astonished to find that
I am perhaps in the minority when it comes to considering how “crowds”
navigate narrow pathways as they run into obstacles.

This incident occurred before the winter holidays in 2010. The hall
where my band rehearses and performs has two main doors from the lobby.
Typically, if you sit on the right side of the stage you use that door
and if you sit on the left you use the other door. (Heaven forbid a
clarinet might use the same door as a trombone! Actually, that reality
probably has interesting results in terms of “who knows whom.”) In any
case, one night before rehearsal I was doing my regular task of bringing
music stands up from the basement to use for rehearsal. After one “lap”
I found one of the band members chatting with our featured singer
standing right in the path of the open right hand door. I approached
carrying four music stands; that’s not so easy, if you’ve never tried
it. The pair did not move, but I figured by the next time I made the
roundtrip they’d be gone. Nope. Not even when others joined me to bring
stands or just their instruments into the hall did these two people
move. I must have walked around them four or five times. To this day I
can’t figure out, nor am I brave enough to ask, what was going on in the
minds of these two smart, talented, typically attentive individuals.

I ran into a different sort of obstacle in January of this year when I
visited Redlands, CA for the GeoDesign Summit and stayed at the very
nice Ayers Hotel. It’s just a few blocks from Esri. Part of the charm of
the place is a full, fancy, cooked-to-order breakfast. Each morning the
small dining room was full of people trying to carry orange juice,
coffee and plates of omelettes to their tables. Many had backpacks or
computer bags with them too. The flow in there was challenging at best.
Why? I think it was the very nice, but large and tall high backed chairs
selected for the dining area. They took up valuable space and obscured
parts of the room, at least for me who looks at the world from 5 ft. 1
in. Those taller than I found their bags bumped the chair backs. When
people tried to “pull in” to allow passage, the huge chairs seemed to
have nowhere to go! I gave up and decided the “to go” breakfast was a
better choice than navigating that traffic challenge each morning.

This month I found some obstacles that would not move, even though they
were in fact moving. I was taking the bus down to the local plaza for
lunch. It was a Saturday, a day the bus is always crowded as folks try
to do their grocery shopping and get their kids haircuts. Two friends
were standing in the aisle, chatting, just beyond the seats with the
“please make these seats available to seniors and those with
disabilities” stickers. There were seats further back on the bus, but
none ahead of where they were standing. Thus, those who wanted to make
the aforementioned seats available had nowhere to go! Only after someone
tried to pass with an “excuse me” did it occur to these ladies (one of
whom carried what I think was a viola on her back, making her “double
wide” in the aisle) that sitting down or moving further back might
eliminate the back up.

Why do I notice these things? I like my space. I’ll happily seek out the
empty area in front of the fireplace at the local coffee shop even if
it’s 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the shop. I’ll happily avoid
prestigious marathons, like the Boston Marathon, to forego the crowds.
I’ll happily go to the gym at 1:00 pm when it’s empty so I can use my
favorite corner of the mats and get my favorite elliptical machine (the
one on the aisle in the second row).

I guess I was born to be a geographer, just a very large scale geographer.