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April 4, 2003
Adena Schutzberg recently visited Penn State as a member of an Advisory Board for an upcoming online Masters course in GIS. She has worked in consulting for Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, MA, where she did field sampling and mapping after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Her experience at ESRI, working the CAD and GIS integration, and other firms, eventually led to the creation of an independent consulting firm.
Adena received her Masters degree from Penn State in 1988; she discovered geography while studying Chemistry at the University of Chicago for her Bachelors degree. "I dropped a Physics course and took a Geography course. I was hooked," she said.
As a first year Masters student, Adena studied geography, practiced for Blue Band try outs, and searched for her passion—a suitable thesis topic. Adena quickly realized that marching in a band requires spatial orientation.
In addition to playing clarinet in the Blue Band, Adena studied the band's spatial learning. "Dr. Bundy, who's now the director, participated, and I recorded practice sessions. I studied people's markings in their music and realized that everybody does it differently: some people use visual cues, some use audio cues, and others use landmarks as guides," she said.
"Through the whole research process, I learned that it doesn't really matter what your thesis topic is, but that you learn the process," Adena stressed. She was accepted to the Peace Corps, and was assigned to a position teaching fisheries science in Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). "I woke up one morning and realized that I didn't want to go to Zaire," she said, emphasizing that it's important to know what you love and just do it.
At Arthur D. Little, Adena worked in the environmental practice. She was handed a box of AutoCAD software and instructed to make maps. "I knew about computers, so I just taught myself," she said, continuing, "And I would have still been doing that if the Exxon Valdez oil spill hadn't happened." Arthur D. Little had premiere scientists working on the spill, and they needed a chemist. "So I went to Alaska, did field sampling, and then made maps of our sampling locations," Adena explained.
At ESRI, Adena specialized in CAD, working on a product called ArcCAD. "I was their person for everything CAD-related," she said. She also had many opportunities to write and present CAD technologies at ESRI. In the process, Adena discovered her passion for writing.
In 2000, Adena started her own company, called ABS Consulting Group, Inc. Her first client was a fellow Penn Stater who hired her to develop a GIS Web directory for his company, TenLinks, Inc. Eventually, that work spawned a weekly GIS newsletter, GIS Monitor, www.gismonitor.com, in August 2000. Professional Surveyor magazine, purchased the GIS directory and GIS Monitor in 2002 and both have grown substantially since. Adena also serves GIS software and imagery venders, doing public relations and marketing work. "I get to learn about cutting edge technologies, and hang out with engineers and scientists."
She is also a member of the Open GIS Consortium's (OGC) communications team. The OGC membership includes software venders, universities and public and private organizations working together to make GIS data and software, from different vendors and on different platforms, work together. The OGC website, http://www.opengis.org, includes downloadable interface specifications that software developers can implement in their software to allow the products to "plug and play" with others.
"What we do with GIS will stay the same, but how we do it will be different in the future," Adena predicts. "The Web will enable users to pick pieces of data from different sources and use data no matter what form it's in. The same will be true for functionality. I'm hopeful GIS will be easier and more accessible for both the public and the professional."
Adena also provided some advice to current students studying geography. "You can take one of two approaches to learning GIS: You can think of it as a cool technology and try to understand as much as possible, or you think of GIS as a tool that applies to 'X'-anything, whatever you're interested in."
"Many people think that doing GIS means just sitting in front of a computer, but that's only one aspect," said Adena. "You can teach GIS, manage a team to use GIS in any discipline, write about GIS, produce analyses, develop data sets, or even teach GIS over the Internet. People need to think about their options much more broadly than in the past," she said.
"Having a geographer's perspective is important," said Adena, "it helps you look at the world through geographers' glasses: you start describing patterns, illuminating patterns, and carrying geography into the world, into different disciplines". For Adena, the subject of these geographic patterns or phenomena is not nearly as important as what we, as geographers, decide to do about them.
For more information about Adena, visit the GIS Monitor website.