Hello everyone,
Welcome to my first post for my GIS Internship course! For this post, I will be introducing my current internship at Chatham County Department of Engineering and information about a potential membership with a local GIS user group, SCARC.
I have been interning with Chatham County Department of Engineering as a GIS Intern in their Savannah, GA office since early July. I have been able to put in many hours so far for my internship and have met the requirement of 130 hours for this course! However, I will continue interning through the end of the year since I know there is a lot more for me to learn there and I am excited to work on different types of projects. The county has funding to pay interns for up to 1300 hours so I know I will get plenty of experience that will help me be a qualified candidate in my future job search. Our GIS office in the Engineering Department works with many of the other departments and some external clients. We receive work requests on the ArcGIS Online Dashboards application. Some of the requests are simple - someone wants to know a historical lot number for a certain parcel which most of the time can be found within the GIS database and other times the projects are more complicated like a current project where we are supplying a software contracted by the county called Crisis Track with several point layers organized with specific geodata needed for the software to operate properly. At my internship, I also get to participate in field work. For example, I've helped with drone flights, GPS collections for streetlights in the county, and LiDAR scanning using a Trimble 3D laser scanner. Finally, there is a on-going project to digitize and enter specific information of all the old sewer and water plats into one layer in our database. I've finished digitizing about 200 of these plats with some dating all the way back from the 1940's! I've been continuing to digitize when I am in between projects or have finished my assigned tasks for the day.
The GIS user group that I have found located near me is SCARC, South Carolina ArcUsers Group. My internship supervisor mentioned that he went to a couple of their "geo beers" meetups about a decade ago so I looked them up to see what the group is up to now. Their meetings are now in Columbia, South Carolina which is a little bit farther than reasonable for me to be casually pop in and meet the group members for a drink. However, they do have an annual conference that is a few days long so I think in a future year I would definitely make the trip to attend. On their website they also have some volunteer opportunities like tech set up at events and helping to source vendors and sponsorships. There is a $35 fee for becoming a member of the group and a $10 student discount. Membership is wide open to any geospatial professional. One of the direct benefits of being in the group is that you get a point towards you GISP per year that you are a member. I'll definitely consider becoming a member and attending their next conference since it seems like I would learn a lot about the industry and meet a lot of other GIS professionals. Here is the link to their website - https://scarcgis.org/
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