Register now for Spring 2013! We encourage all current students to get an early start on registration for

the Spring 1 term, which begins on January 2nd. This starting date is close to the holidays and to avoid delays in processing your registration, it would be wonderful if you would begin your registration a bit earlier than you might normally. In addition, we have more students than ever in our Master’s and Certificate programs, and many courses fill quickly. Registration for Spring 2013 is already open and instructions on how to register can be found at http://gis.e-education.psu.edu/gis/register.

Inside This Issue 1 Welcome

1 Register now for 2013

1 New Schedule Model

2 New Courses

3 GEOINT Awards 4 2012 Esri UC

5 Student Map Wins Award

5 Webinar series begins third year

6 Faculty Spotlight 7 Stay in Touch … Tips

from Beth King

Editor’s Note: As you read the articles, please note the live hyperlinks. By hovering over and clicking the links, you’ll navigate to related online content or email.

Greetings from Anthony Robinson The past year has presented a range of new challenges and

opportunities for Penn Staters of all types, including those of us engaged in Online Geospatial Education. In this edition of our program newsletter, you’ll learn about what we’re doing to continue to improve the quality and value of our offerings. In addition to new course offerings like our Spatial Databases and Cloud and Server GIS classes, beginning in 2013 our programs will be moving to a new semester schedule. This new schedule will provide five opportunities a year to take courses, and offers more options than ever for students to finish their certificate or degree faster or to enjoy maximum flexibility to take courses when it’s most convenient.

I am pleased to report that interest in our courses and programs is at an all-time high from GIS/GeoInt professionals all over the world. The past several semesters have seen record-high enrollments, and applicants to our Master’s degree programs are more exceptional than ever. These results are a testimony to the fact that our Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni are widely known for their excellent work, professionalism, and innovative spirit. We are most proud of our current and former students who have set the standard for excellence in the geospatial profession.

Dr. Anthony Robinson,

Lead Faculty for Online Geospatial Education

*

New Schedule Model for Online Geospatial Education

Beginning in January 2013, the Department of Geography’s Online Geospatial Education programs will move from offering four 10-week terms per year to five 10-week terms per year. There will be two terms in the Fall, two in the Spring, and one each Summer. The Fall and Spring terms will partially overlap by 3 weeks.

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Going forward, students in our Online Geospatial Education programs will have more options than ever to

take courses and pursue a GIS/GeoInt Certificate or Degree. These changes to our semester schedule have multiple major benefits, including:

• Master’s students will be eligible for Federal Financial Aid for the first time in our program’s history, and Master’s students can take 6 credits (to achieve half-time status required to receive Aid) in a given Fall or Spring semester with only a short 3-week period of time in which their two courses overlap.

• It will now be possible to pick and choose among five opportunities a year to take courses – nobody is required to take overlapping classes, but for those who want to finish faster, it will be possible to finish a Certificate in just 9 months and a Master’s degree in just over 2 years. For those who want maximum flexibility, there will be a fifth time per year to take a class and achieve a balanced work-life-education schedule.

• Students will have the ability to register online for most courses, and payment plans that have been available to most Penn State students to defer and extend payments will be available for the first time to all of our online students.

More information on these important changes to our online program’s schedule is available on our Program Office website – www.pennstategis.com/newschedule/ . New courses for your professional development

If you haven’t looked at the course calendar in the program office recently, you might be surprised by the many new offerings available:

GEOG 480: Exploring Imagery and Elevation Data in GIS Applications (Spring 1, Summer, Fall 1)

GEOG 497B: Location Intelligence for Business (Spring 1, Fall 1)

GEOG 897A: Cultural Intelligence, Applied Geography, and Homeland Security (Spring 1, Summer, Fall 1)

GEOG 897C: Cloud and Server GIS (Spring 1, Summer)

GEOG 897D: Spatial Databases (Spring 2, Fall 1)

GEOG 897E: Emerging Trends in Remote Sensing and Advanced Image Analysis (Spring 2, Fall 1)

GEOG 897G: Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Seminar (Spring 2, Fall 2)

Whether you’ve completed your certificate or degree, or you’re looking for an interesting elective, you should consider taking one of these new offerings. These courses, as with most others in our program, may be taken ala carte for professional development.

New Schedule Model (continued)

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Donna Bridges receives 2012 Michael Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence

Ms. Donna Bridges received the 2012 Michael Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence from the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Michael Flynn. Presentation of her award took place at the 2012 GEOINT Symposium on October 10 in Orlando, Florida. Donna is an All-Source Intelligence Analyst in the Geospatial Analysis Branch at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is currently completing her MGIS degree.

The endowed award named in honor of Lt. Michael P. Murphy, Medal of Honor recipient and distinguished Penn State alumnus, recognizes achievement by a graduate student who is serving or has served with the U.S. Intelligence community. The award is made possible by the gracious gifts of the GeoEye Foundation, the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, and Dr. & Mrs. Todd S. Bacastow. For more information on the award or Lt. Murphy’s heroic story, contact: Dr. Todd S. Bacastow at bacastow@psu.edu

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, director of DIA, with Dr. Todd S. Bacastow, presents Donna Bridges with the Lt. Michael P. Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence

“The Michael P. Murphy Award was started by Penn State in honor of someone who made the ultimate sacrifice and I am both very honored and humbled to be recognized with this award.”

--Donna Bridges

Three Penn Staters Win USGIF Scholarships Congratulations to Nouman Hussain, MGIS candidate, who has been awarded a United States Geospatial

Intelligence Foundation Scholarship for the 2012-13 academic year! This is a significant achievement resulting from a highly competitive review by an independent panel of GEOINT community professionals. Recipients were invited to attend the annual GEOINT Symposium October 8-11 in Orlando, Florida. The GEOINT Symposium is the preeminent intelligence event of the year, providing a forum where more than 4,000 attendees network with government, industry, academic, and military leaders, learn from top innovators in the intelligence community, and discover cutting-edge geospatial intelligence technologies.

Other Penn State recipients include Geography PhD candidate Raechel Bianchetti and Geography undergraduate student Everleigh Stokes. Todd Bacastow, Geospatial Intelligence faculty lead, noted that “Three awards seems to be a record for any single institution.” Congratulations to our winners and compliments to the continued success of Geospatial Intelligence programs at Penn State.

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2012 Esri User Conference In July, a dozen of our Faculty and Staff attended the 2012 Esri International User Conference in San Diego.

This meeting is our best annual opportunity to meet many of you in person at our booths in the Academic GIS Program Fair and the GIS EXPO. Among the 14,000+ attendees of the Esri UC are hundreds of our program students and alumni, and it’s our honor to meet so many of you each year at this important meeting.

Many of you visited the Penn State booth, at either the Education fair on Monday night or the trade show floor throughout the week. More than 100 of you were able to join us for our San Diego harbor cruise on Wednesday evening. We hope to see many more of you in San Diego in 2013!

Penn State Online Geospatial students presenting at the Esri UC included:

Michael Rink –Long-term Shoreline Change Study of Morris and Folly Islands, SC

Vanessa Damato –Cluster Analysis on Demographics in Human Trafficking Source Provinces, Cambodia

Jeri Ledbetter –Inventory, Assessment, and Stewardship of Springs Ecosystems through Geocollaboration

William Dietze –Using GIS to Measure Modern Development at Teotihuacan, Mexico

Founding Geospatial Education Program Director

David DiBiase catches up with an MGIS alum.

Students and alumni enjoy a relaxing sunset

harbor cruise around San Diego.

Lead faculty Dr. Anthony Robinson speaking with a student as Dr. Frank Hardisty listens in.

Plenty of mingling and conversation

on the HMS Hornblower.

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to illustrate the geographic reach of GES in the northern Marcellus Shale region. Approximately 78% of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale is within a 2 hour drive of a GES office, giving our clients the confidence of knowing that we are only a short drive away from their operating areas. Data sources: USGS National Assessment of Oil and Gas Project Assessment Units, Esri Street Map North America 10, ArcGIS Online World Terrain Base Map.

Webinar series begins its third year with upcoming episode on programming and development

Join us on December 13th for the 9th webinar in the series, What Tomorrow’s GIS Workforce Needs to Know About GIS Programming and Development - Are You Prepared? Faculty members Jim Detwiler and James O’Brien and Esri software developer Craig Williams will discuss key programming and development trends and how those trends are addressed in Penn State’s comprehensive offering of geospatial programming and database development courses. For more information, and to register to attend, click here.

The Inside Geospatial Education and Research webinar series, hosted with Directions Media, was created with two purposes in mind: to showcase Penn State's award-winning Online Geospatial Education program and to present cutting-edge topics from thought leaders to geospatial professionals. In celebration of two years of this successful webinar series, we also invite you revisit any webinars you previously attended or to view those you may have missed.

For links to the webinars and a full description of each, visit the webinars page at our in the program office. Most of the webinars are also archived on YouTube—share this URL with your friends and colleagues, or tell them to search “penn state GIS webinars” at YouTube.

Roger Bannister map places 3rd at 2012 Esri User Conference Roger Bannister, MGIS candidate, submitted a work-related map to the Esri User Conference Map Gallery

Contest this year “on a lark,” he says. As it turns out, he took third place in the Best Cartographic Design – Single Map Product – Large Format – In-House Copy category! Roger reacted to his success by saying the award was, “a nice surprise considering all of the other excellent maps on display.” Below is a thumbnail of his map and a brief description.

Northern Marcellus Shale Service Area, by Roger Bannister: Groundwater and Environmental Services, Inc. (GES) provides environmental services for oil and gas exploration and production companies targeting the Marcellus Shale, one of the largest unconventional natural gas resources in the United States. Responsible well development requires operators to be sensitive to the community’s concerns and to be responsive when potential environmental problems arise. This map was developed

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Faculty Spotlight … Meet Karen Schuckman Karen is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at The Pennsylvania State

University, focusing teaching efforts on remote sensing and image analysis.

She also serves as a consultant to URS Corporation in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Karen supported response, recovery and mitigation projects with FEMA following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

From 1995 – 2005, she was with the EarthData group. Notable projects led by Karen for EarthData include LIDAR acquisition for the North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Program, numerous transportation mapping projects for state DOT’s, and technology demonstration projects for NOAA, NASA and the US Department of Transportation.

Prior to joining the private sector, Karen worked for the USGS National Mapping Division, in Menlo Park, California. She is a Past-President of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (APSRS), former vice-chair of the NOAA Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing (ACCRES), and a member of the National Research Council Committees on Floodplain Mapping Technologies and FEMA Flood Map Accuracy. She holds a MGIS from Penn State and is an ASPRS Certified Photogrammetrist and Professional Land Surveyor.

What is your favorite part of your job in our online geospatial education program? Seeing students get excited about using imagery, elevation data, and remote sensing analysis tools in their current jobs. My courses can be pretty hard going at some point during the semester because they are so software and data intensive. However, by the end of the course, students get to apply what they have learned to their own area of interest. The creativity and variety of applications always impresses me. Every semester, it seems that the projects get better and more interesting!

Can you provide an interesting personal story about yourself? Geez, where do I start? Most people assume I have been in photogrammetry and remote sensing all of my life, but in fact, I only was introduced to this field in my mid-30s when I was a young, single parent looking for a steady job in an interesting field. I was an internationally competitive gymnast in high school on the US National Team for the 1971 Pan American Games and 1972 Olympics. I came to Penn State for college thinking I was quitting gymnastics, but I ended up “walking on” the women’s team during my freshman year (1973-74). I won the AIAW (predates the NCAA for women) National Championship that year, and became the first female athlete to receive a scholarship in any sport at Penn State. I graduated with a BS in Meteorology and worked as a Computational Physicist for an R&D company in California. I left that job to raise my two daughters, and ended up living in Raisin City, CA (yes, such a place exists outside of Fresno) and training Standardbred horses for harness racing. I studied photogrammetry at Cal State Fresno, and had the incredible luck and good fortune to enter this career, largely due joining ASPRS as a student member. I found I really loved photogrammetry and mapping, and even more, I loved the people who worked in this field. I was also incredibly lucky to be able to return “home” to Penn State as an instructor in the online program, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I get to pass on what I have learned to others, and I spend the rest of my time with my husband, my two dogs and two cats, our four grown daughters, and singing with my friends at the American Ale House piano bar. I’m SO lucky!

Which of your lessons do you find most challenging to convey to students? Accuracy, and the quantification of error, is an incredibly important part of the profession. People who rely on imagery and elevation data assume that adequate quality assurance has been performed, but they do not understand what that actually means or entails. Making images or DEMs is easy. Telling people how accurate they are is not. Accuracy standards are based on statistical models, they are difficult to understand, and there are many of them. Students definitely find accuracy and error quantification to be the most challenging

Karen Schuckman

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3. Have you attended or watched a recording of one of the new semester schedule webinars?

https://gis.e-education.psu.edu/newschedule 4. Do you have an announcement to make? Know about a great geospatial job opportunity? Send it to

me and I'll post it on our forum.

https://gis.e-education.psu.edu/forum/announcements https://gis.e-education.psu.edu/forum/career_opportunities

Stay in touch!

Beth

Stay Connected … with Penn State Online Geospatial Education Network with current and prospective students!

Our Penn State Geospatial Education Alumni map allows viewers to zoom in to areas of interest and locate program alumni. If you would like your contact information to be made available to prospective and current students and fellow alumni, contact Beth King.

Have you done something interesting with your Penn State Online Geospatial Education? Contact us directly and tell us about your new career, award, or interesting project resulting from your

experiences as a student in Penn State’s Online Geospatial Education Program. We’ll highlight you in our next newsletter.

And follow us on social media …

Click LinkedIn Facebook or Twitter

I try to limit my mass emails to students, but there are always things I want to remind you about. If I could email you every day, these are some of the things I would write:

1. Is your contact information on the alumni map? https://gis.e-education.psu.edu/alumni.html

If it's not and you're willing to have it listed there, please click the "Read more" link at the top of that page for instructions on how to get it listed.

2. Are you presenting your MGIS Capstone Project soon? Is your Capstone information showing up on this page?

https://gis.e-education.psu.edu/mgis/resources/presentations

1.877.PSU.GIS1

Beth King

Meet Karen Schuckman (continued) concepts to understand. Remote sensing is also very software tool intensive, and students who are not comfortable with working through bugs and glitches find the hands-on work to be challenging. It’s also the most rewarding part if you learn to work through technology issues.

Tips for Staying Connected … Beth King, Assistant Program Manager for Advising

Geospatial Education faculty and all-around student guru Beth King shares an “open letter” to our students and alumni on how to stay in touch with Penn State during and after your studies:

www.pennstategis.com