November Undergraduate Student of the Month
Joseph Ruiz
Background:
1) What major(s), minors, and/or certificates you are working on at UMD?
I am majoring in GIS
2) What are your interests within your program(s)?
My interest within my program is Digital Cartography
3) What previous jobs, internships, and volunteer experience have you had?
Previous jobs: US Air Force, Software Development Intern at Carr Astronautics, Student Manager at UMD Stamp IT Dept., and was president of Terp Vets Student Veteran Organization.
4) Where you are from?
I am from Texas
Internship:
1) Where you are interning?
Currently, I'm a GIS Specialist Intern at USAID
2) What are your internship responsibilities?
I do spatial analysis of the USAID projects taking place in over 60 developing countries around the world.
3) What project(s) are you working on or contributing to?
I am currently working on a "money map" for the country of Rwanda. It is basically a choropleth map of the estimated expenditure amounts per district in that country.
4) How the internship experience is relevant to your studies in Geographical Sciences.
The experience is relevant because I am using the skills that I have learned in GEOG373 and GEOG473 to create maps and do spatial analysis using the tools in ArcMap.
5) What are your career goals after your graduate?
My career goal after I graduate is to continue working at USAID (they already expressed interest in hiring me full time after I graduate).