Students hone geospatial skills in Europe

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For Celia Ghilani, this year was one for trying new things. Always wanting to study abroad, she seized the opportunity presented by the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences to travel and study with her peers in Europe. She’s an environmental systems engineering student at Penn State, but her interest in maps and geospatial intelligence inspired her to spend two weeks in May expanding her horizons.

Ghilani is one of 20 students who took advantage of an intensive study abroad experience offered to undergraduate students in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, through the Center for Advanced Undergraduate Studies and Experience (CAUSE) program, and graduate students enrolled in online geospatial education courses offered through the Department of Geography. The course, "Challenges in Global Geospatial Analytics," is an exploration of geospatial technologies and how they can be used to solve real-world problems.

Even though it was far from her major, Ghilani said she found the lessons useful as she fine tunes her career objectives.

“I feel confident that Penn State is preparing me well for a career in environmental systems engineering,” Ghilani said. “There are so many resources and opportunities for me. The CAUSE program is a great example because cartography and data visualization are not heavily focused on in my major, yet they are things that interest me and could help me in a future career.”

This is the third time the embedded study abroad course was offered as part of the online geospatial programs in geography, but it’s the first time undergraduate students participated.

Fritz Kessler, teaching professor of geography, and Beth King, associate teaching professor of geography, who taught the course, said having the mixture of graduate students and undergraduate students working together was ideal.

“We had 12 undergraduate students and eight graduate students. Not only did they work together, but the mentoring that took place was really fun to observe,” King said. “On one of the longer bus trips between countries students passed around a microphone. Graduate students shared information about their current work in geospatial industries and how they got to that point in their careers. Undergraduate students shared information about their various majors and future plans and asked questions about obtaining internships and gaining experience.”

Penn State students collaborated with students and faculty at the Vienna University of Technology and with European Union professionals in the field, gaining first-hand experience on using geospatial technologies to visualize the COVID-19 pandemic while developing potential solutions to this real-world problem. They traveled to Austria, Slovenia, Germany, and the Czech Republic, visited international planning and mapping organizations, and participated in a unique education-based research and study abroad opportunity. The goal was to learn how geospatial data related to time and space can be used to address a humanitarian crisis.

“Being able to learn first-hand from mapping organizations in these countries allowed students to realize the importance that geospatial data and the mapping tools needed to map that data play in a country’s infrastructure, government and planning,” Kessler said.

In their projects, students addressed the following topics: creating an algorithm that ranked European Union countries that were most vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing a plan to provide COVID-19 vaccinations for young Ukrainians impacted by the war with Russia, linking the variables of green spaces with COVID-19 mental health impacts and addressing the public health challenge of dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic.

Hayden Reboulet, a senior majoring in energy and sustainability policy (ESP), entered the course because it meshed nicely with his career goals of becoming an energy and sustainability consultant. After finishing the study abroad component of the course, he is now determined to pursue a master of geographic information systems (GIS) after he earns his undergraduate degree this fall.

“This trip led me to conversations with individuals who are already pursuing careers in GIS while completing their master’s program and showed me this path is possible,” Reboulet said.

Reboulet, who lived in Germany from ages 3 to 7, said the course was a chance to immerse himself in GIS, especially talking to the experts and visiting institutions specializing in it. Some of his favorite experiences included a scavenger hunt in Salzburg, Germany, and visiting the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping, and Cadastre, where students saw cutting-edge technology put to use. The course and shadowing GIS experts inspired Reboulet to further advance his skills, he said.

“Penn State is preparing me for a future career in the vein of ESP by providing instruction from faculty who have worked previously in the field, giving me hands-on training through internships and my capstone course, and providing me the tools to engage with other cultures and work with them on projects such as what we did during the CAUSE 2023 trip,” Reboulet said.

Brianna Furey is already a student in the aster of GIS program. She first completed the GIS graduate certificate, but, after finding the skills immediately useful to her full-time job, continued on through the master’s program, which is offered through World Campus and is flexible enough for her to keep working full time. She said she’s most interested in the programming side of GIS.

She signed up for this course, in part, because she could meet some of her classmates in person. While abroad, she worked with international students to build a geovisual analytics tool centered around the COVID-19 pandemic while providing relief for those affected by it. 

“It was interesting learning about the field of geovisualization and how to apply that knowledge to a simulated real-world problem, as well as getting to know the international master’s program students from all over the world,” Furey said. “We also toured the augmented reality lab in Vienna, which was neat to see.”

Furey said the experience was just a piece of her overall journey to becoming a GIS expert. It gave her new skills and connections while giving her a chance to see more of the world. 

“For me, completing this degree means much more than just having an extra line on my resume; it means increasing my professional knowledge and skills as a lifelong learner, and also being able to apply those skills to my career and to the field of geography and GIS to help others,” Furey said.

Penn State’s Department of Geography offers online graduate certificates in GIS, geospatial intelligence, geospatial programming and web map development, remote sensing and earth observation and master’s degree programs in GIS and spatial data science.

CAUSE was created in the early 1990s by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences to promote interdisciplinary, problem-based learning opportunities for students. A centerpiece of CAUSE has been a multi-semester seminar course that allows students to do theme-based research both in the classroom and out in the field during Maymester or summer.