Call for Projects: UW GIS Certificate Program
Posted: 10/29/2021 ()
The University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education’s GIS Certificate program is seeking project ideas for the 2020/2021 academic year. As in past year, we are soliciting ideas from organizations and agencies around the region, including local or regional governments agencies, non-profits, engineering and consulting firms, and private businesses of any nature. If you have a project idea that might be a good fit for the students of the GIS Certificate Program, we would appreciate hearing from you!
Here’s a little bit about what would make a good student project:
- Size: should be appropriate for a 3-4 (maybe 5) student project team
- Schedule: Project selection takes place during October and November. Students begin working on the projects in January as Winter quarter begins and deliverables are completed and turned over to the sponsor at the conclusion of the program in early June.
- Content: in order to offer the students quality learning opportunities, a project should not be limited to a single activity such as data development or data editing/collection. Opportunities to perform any of the following help increase the learning value of the experience: database design, data collection, mapping/cartography, spatial analysis, ArcGIS Online map publishing, etc.
- Sponsorship: some of our best projects have been real-world practical projects submitted by organizations like yours from around the region (including, in the past, from Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska). These projects are typically efforts that the sponsoring organization has wanted to act on, but, until now, has been unable to address due to their own limited resources.
- Time commitment for sponsors: this does not need to be a great impact on you. Some students interview their sponsors to assess the needs and requirements, and then work independently from that point forward. Other projects have very active sponsors who may meet regularly with the student team, and is involved in reviewing documents, providing feedback, and other activities. Regardless of the level of involvement, sponsors will receive periodic status reports from the team as the projects progress.
We have found that many organizations have perfect candidate projects in tasks that have been lingering on the back-burner for some time. Utilizing our student teams is a great way to get some of these small projects off the back-burner and, at the same time, provide valuable experience for the students. As for quality of results, our program focuses on practical and professional execution of projects in a way that strongly mimics how a project would be executed in the workplace. We have had great success with the vast majority of our projects and many have gone on to win awards at the annual WAGISA (formerly WAURISA) conference and other conferences.
If you have a project in mind, here are the details that we would need to get started:
- Sponsor name and contact information
- Name of proposed project
- Brief description of proposed project (a short paragraph is ideal)
Students will begin discussing projects towards the end of October, and by mid-November all projects will have been selected. Ideally, we would like to hear from you on or before Wednesday October 13. However, if you think of a project later than that, we would still like to hear from you.
If you have any questions or project ideas, please feel free to contact Harvey Arnone: HARVEY.ARNONE@Seattle.gov