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Trudy Suchan (PhD '98) at the U.S. Census Bureau:
June 13, 2003
After receiving her Ph.D. in Geography from Penn State in 1998, Trudy Suchan began working for the U.S. Census Bureau in the Population Division. Trudy recently co-authored "Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity" with Cindy Brewer, and she still keeps in touch with her advisor, Alan MacEachren.
When did you first become interested in Geography? How did you discover cartography?
I spent about six months working with a psychologist who specialized in work issues to decide on a new career path in my mid-30s. I took a series of tests to determine my interests and skill set and the results indicated that I thought like people who are geographers.
I had a business degree, and I was working in the law department of a forest products company in Seattle. I was exposed to GIS and mapping in my job but didn't know what else geographers did. I kept my job while I worked on developing my career path.
I went through the masters program in geography at the University of Washington. Then I worked in environmental consulting briefly, team-writing environmental impact statements, but I was looking into Ph.D. programs and dissertation topics. My interests were fairly well focused based on work I did for my masters. I did my Ph.D. at Penn State looking at categories and classification in mapping and GIS, and my advisor was Alan MacEachren.
So I didn't 'find' geography early in life. I started in my 30s, and the career change was step by step that ultimately led to a big change. It doesn't have to happen all at once.
What led you to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Population Division?
It was actually the geographic descriptions that brought me to the Census Bureau. I was really interested in the geographic areas that the population data are aggregated to: questions like "How is rural defined?" "What is a place?" "Is a metropolitan area a statistical or a cultural concept?" These were the theories and concepts I was interested in addressing.
Questions like these are a part of what the Census Bureau does. I identified this group of people as research subjects for my dissertation. We already had a lot of research interests in common, and we learned a lot about each other in the process too. So now I work with some of the people I quote in my dissertation!
What do you enjoy most about working for the Census Bureau?
My work here is aligned with my ethos. I get information to people in this country based on answers they all provided on the census questionnaire. Remembering this helps when the bureaucracy occasionally bogs me down. There are good ideals behind it.
Could you describe your collaborative work with Dr. Cindy Brewer for the book "Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity"?
In 1993, I started graduate work at Penn State, and Cindy Brewer joined the faculty not long after. She was on my dissertation committee. We published together in "The Professional Geographer". So we were comfortable collaborating and we stayed in touch.
Cindy took a sabbatical from Penn State at the time the Census 2000 population data were being released, so she worked as an academic in residence at the Census Bureau. We worked together on the book "Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity". The book, which has 75 maps on race and Hispanic population distribution, is now serving as a prototype for a larger book, which is my current work. We'll use about ten times that many maps to show much more population and housing information from Census 2000 and we'll show change using historical decennial census data. We hope the book captures the cultural era of the late 20th century in some way like the classic U.S. census atlases of the late 19th century did.
Could you also describe your work with Penn State's GeoVISTA Center? How do you and your colleagues use the research?
I worked with Alan MacEachren on research funded by the Digital Government program. It's a National Science Foundation program that brings universities, government agencies, and companies together on IT research that ideally will have practical application in government or business. Three universities, eight federal agencies, and several private-sector partners shared in the research on quality graphics for statistical summaries. It's a great thing that my job keeps me connected to academics and the Digital Government project also connected me with like-minded people at other federal agencies here in Washington.
Would you like to share any advice to people interested in cartography or population statistics? Or current students interested in working for the Census Bureau?
The trick is to find geographers, and you have to look in the less obvious places. There is a Geography Division at the Census Bureau, which is a natural place for geographers to look for work. But I work in the Population Division with a small group of geographers among many statisticians and demographers. We work on getting information to the public with a geographic perspective.
You really have to ask, "Where are the geographers?" You might have to work hard to figure it out. But there's a flip side too: There are lots of geographers working on all different kinds of things. For example, at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) geographers work with GIS on site analysis. Those geographers are determining where the IRS should place customer service centers.
If the Census Bureau intrigues you as a place to work, take some basic statistics classes in the Geography Department and in other departments too. You don't have to become a statistics expert, but you have more career paths at the Census Bureau if you have those statistics courses.
