Study Geographic Information Systems at Otago

Matt Wright:

Hi, my name is Matt and I did a minor in GIS alongside my major in Geography at Otago. I didn’t even know what GIS was until my second year of uni, but I quickly started to understand how it’s important to understand how the world works around us and how we use it in our daily lives.

Doing GIS allowed me to work on interesting projects with like modest students from different departments like Marine Science, Geology, Ecology and Surveying. Doing GIS at Otago is a great opportunity to work under the National School of Surveying, who offer great facilities, teachers who are leaders in their field, and awesome social events which definitely encourage you to get behind.

Associate Professor Antoni Moore:

Hi there, I’m Tony Moore. I’m from the School of Surveying at the University of Otago, a school that also covers spatial sciences, which includes GIS – Geographic Information Systems – which I’m talking about today.

GIS is the science of mapping. It’s the science of spatial analysis. Mapping is where we communicate answers to geographic problems, and spatial analysis is where we actually generate the answers to those problems using a scientific method.

Within the school, we specialise in a lot of areas in GIS and in remote sensing, where we image the Earth’s surface from a remote platform like a satellite, a drone or an aircraft. For instance: active transport, monitoring and measuring mountain environments, coastal environments, environmental modelling and monitoring of those environments, as well as Antarctica and measurements of the sea bottom or a river bottom or lake bottom. That’s hydrographic surveying.

So in a nutshell, GIS is the science and technology of Google Earth, which is familiar to us all. It’s come a long way since when I started. As a kid, I had a fascination with maps, which turned into a Geography degree where I discovered GIS – and now we really have the world at our fingertips through digital means.

What does it mean at Otago? Well, in first year you get grounding in geospatial science as well as Info Science and Computer Science. You can top that up with Geography and Surveying courses as well.

Assessment-wise, what you do practically are solve problems in the field and in the lab – and that’s really the first year in a nutshell.

Where’s it lead to by the end? Well, the job market is quite broad. If you think about where space is important, geography is important – that is a lot of sectors, and so we get jobs from all.

On campus, we have GIS students who also take a lot of other courses that deal with space, like Geography, like Surveying, Marine Science, the Life Sciences, Health Sciences. And in the job market we also get breadth as well – from the obvious national mapping, mobile technologies, to not-so-obvious agriculture, forestry – and in practice, our graduates have tended to go to local governments up and down the country: city councils, regional councils, as well as GIS companies.

So these are all very good reasons to embrace and take this current hot technology.

Thank you.