These two weeks I’ve had a bit too much work, and on top of that I developed some interest in history and politics and spent two days flipping through Selected Works of Mao Zedong. As a result, there’s been barely any progress on work related to my thesis, and I haven’t updated my blog either. Recently I’ve been talking a lot with senior lab mates and classmates about employment, which brought up our love–hate relationship with our major. I came up with some additional thoughts while showering, so I decided to write them down.
The interdisciplinary field I’m talking about here is “Geographic Information Science,” whose Wikipedia entry reads as follows:
Geographic Information Science (GI Science or GIScience) or Geoinformatics is an applied science formed on the basis of the intersection between information science and earth system science. It is a highly integrated body of modern technologies including Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS), computer technology, and digital transmission networks. It uses information flow as a means to study the patterns of movement of material flow, energy flow, and people flow within the earth system. It was proposed in 1992 by British-American geographer Michael Frank Goodchild.
The research object of Geoinformation Science is the earth system. Applying information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory to the study of the earth system gives rise to the methodology of Geoinformation Science.
Compared with Geographic Information Systems, it places more emphasis on treating geographic information as a science rather than merely a technical implementation. It mainly studies: distributed computing, cognition of geographic information, interoperability of geographic information, scale, the future of spatial information infrastructures, uncertainty in geographic data and GIS-based analysis, GIS and society, spatial analysis of geographic information systems in environmental contexts, acquisition and integration of spatial data, and so on. While researching geographic information technologies, Geographic Information Science also emphasizes the importance of basic theoretical research that supports the development of geographic information technologies.
My relationship with it can be simply described as one of “adjustment and being adjusted” (i.e., being transferred between programs). As an undergraduate, my rough understanding of research in the GIS direction was basically that whole paragraph after the comparison with “geographic information systems” above. I had a huge thirst for knowledge about things like spatial data structures and theories related to spatial analysis. After starting graduate studies, because I switched into an engineering degree and an engineering-oriented training program for various objective reasons, what I have been doing is more engineering—i.e., the so‑called application side of Geographic Information Systems. I’ve built some application projects, but I keep feeling that my skill tree has grown in a weird way, and I’ve started to doubt my own core competitiveness.
The way I understand “core competitiveness” is: the theoretical knowledge system of my discipline plus the relevant technologies I’ve accumulated through study and work, which can meet the requirements of a certain job, give me competitiveness for a certain position, and which people from outside my discipline cannot acquire in the short term.
The entire knowledge system of Geographic Information Science is quite vast. Compared with the label “Geographic Information Science,” I feel that my knowledge path would more accurately be described as “Surveying and Mapping” and “Information Science.” Although my undergraduate courses included disciplines such as “Physical Geography” and “Human Geography,” they have little connection with the technical research directions I hoped to pursue. In contrast, “Cartography” and computer-related subjects have become the theoretical and technical foundation of my daily study and work.
Measured against the discipline of “Geographic Information Science” and looking at myself, what exactly is my core competitiveness?
In terms of “geography,” I’ve basically forgotten almost everything from my “Physical Geography” and “Human Geography” courses. I’m reasonably proficient with some GIS software, and my grasp of “Principles of Cartography” is also okay, but none of this seems to rise to the level of core competitiveness. As for “basic cartography,” the only area that has any potential to become a core strength—knowledge such as map projections and spatial reference systems—there’s no barrier preventing someone from learning this in a short time. And with today’s increasingly mature open-source technologies, people outside the discipline can even build applications without understanding these at all.
In terms of “information technology,” during my master’s I did pick up some so‑called front‑end and back‑end tech stacks in response to engineering needs. But leaving aside whether these technologies are mature enough to be applied directly in production, even by my own standards my self‑assessment is very pessimistic. Because project timelines are tight, I mostly start from a QUICK START and stop once things can run. It’s hard to find time for deeper research—or perhaps I simply lack the theoretical foundation to go deeper. Put simply, my “information technology” and “spatial information” are, to a large extent, disconnected.
Given that the theoretical research on “Geographic Information Science,” or “Geographic Information Systems,” is relatively mature today, is there still any need for a training program like mine?
From my perspective, the work I’m doing now—even if I had never done my undergraduate studies—could still be completed 99% without any loss in quality. And all the new technologies I’ve learned come entirely from open source project docs, which makes me feel very dejected. If I can do it this way, it means that people without a “Geographic Information Science” background can do it too.
I can do it, but I don’t do it well. You can easily imagine the quality of an application whose life cycle runs from Quick Start to “it runs.” Any software engineering major, or even someone who just finished a bootcamp, would probably do a better job than I do. This is where my question about whether this training program still needs to exist comes from.
This forces me to compete with formally trained programmers, relying on my flimsy foundation in computer science. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way; one should have at least one real skill. That’s where my desire to continue on to a PhD comes from.
Thinking about it, the illusion that our major makes it easier to find a job than geology or geography comes from the fact that, in this wave of the internet, we have barely, and under duress, picked up some weak, incomplete “brick‑moving skills” that can be used in this tide—nothing more.
Several of my senior classmates have already joined internet companies. Using the same self‑taught skills, they’ve succeeded in the competition described above and are now doing work no longer related to our field. Unfortunately, I don’t have the confidence that I could win out in that competition like they did.
Perhaps “Geographic Information Science” is no longer suitable as an undergraduate study path. Let those theoretical researches be done by PhDs. If the goal is only to train application‑oriented talent for “Geographic Information Systems,” then there’s really no need—students from Software Engineering programs are already fully capable of doing that.