I remember sitting in a geography 101 class, and the professor mentioned I could work with satellites, and was immediately hooked. Got through my undergrad, and after a few years working in a super boring unrelated job went back and got my masters. Through my projects had to teach myself to code because ESRI was garbage. After that my career blew up, and never looked back.

I stumbled into GIS. Mine is not a “GIS career,” but it’s been very GIS-centric at several points.

I first stumbled into mapping projects when I was measuring time and frequency shifts from satellites as an electrical engineer. Satellite ephemeris mattered, and so did the shape of the earth. And when you’re tracking things on the surface of the earth, you have to map them.

My next stop was in the context of an electric utility where we had to do everything from tracking the location of physical plant to calculating path loss for microwave links. Finally, off in grad school for something completely unrelated, I found myself working utility problems as a consultant. I stumbled into Postgres/PostGIS, then QGIS, then GeoServer and MapServer. I was hooked from there on out.

It still remains an ancillary part of what I do, but I’m as likely to open QGIS for a personal project as work.

I sort of stumbled into it. I was medium computer-oriented as a kid, and I majored in Management Information Systems in college, which felt like a very broad, Jack-of-all-trades IT program. Little bit of networking, little bit of programming, little bit of database work, etc.

When I graduated the job market was terrible and I wound up getting a job in petroleum doing data entry and reporting, got hired away to do similar work for a smaller company, and got laid off and hired to a much larger company doing more of the same. I’m not sure when or how I got started in Arc, but the department I was in used Arc for lease mapping and I excelled at it, and now ~13 years later I’m one of three guys in our division’s GIS group under the IT department. I’d never heard of GIS before I started here and now I feel like I’m a fairly decent cartographer, data wrangler, and Python programmer.

I kinda feel like GIS chose me. :)

Like others here, I kind of stumbled into it. Went to college for software engineering, had a medical withdraw due to some severe illness, got that corrected but had a year to kill before I could re-enroll. Got a job to kill time as an entry-level CAD drafter. Transitioned to a GIS technician because Python, never went back. I plan on re-enrolling part-time this fall and hopefully transitioning back to a software dev role. But at least for my company, GIS = a little bit of CAD + a little bit of Computer Science. So it worked out well.

I went to college in the early 1990s not knowing what I wanted to do. Getting my general courses out of the way at a local community college, I took a Geography class and fell in love with almost everything about Geography. After a couple of years, I moved on to a University to major in Geography wanting to make maps magazines basically. Like Newsweek, Time or even National Geographic. Or become a teacher, which I did not want to do. Then two of my Geography professors started pushing GIS as a discipline/career and offering basic courses. I loved everything about GIS. Three months out of college in 1995, I landed a job as a GIS Coordinator for a very small rural midwestern county.

It was a 100% ground-floor GIS implementation starting with the County Assessor, like most county GIS started. I walk into my new office on my first day and in the middle of the room were stacks of boxes containing an AIX/Unix workstation. 26" CRT monitor, Arc/INFO workstation software and an HP DesignJet 650c (I think). It was a challenge learning both Unix and possibly the most complicated GIS software ever. For the kids who may not know, Arc/Info workstation was a command line-driven GIS software from Esri. ALL aspects of using the software had to be typed into a command line. Until you learned the art of making custom menus.

Then we bought a used HUGE digitizing table. The guy was at least 6ft x 5ft with motorized lift and tilt.

Anyway, I’ve been doing this for about 28 years now. I’m still enjoying it for the most part. I’m in the private sector now and don’t really care for the stress and worry of always having to make a profit.

Honestly I chose to major in Geography at random in college because the few classes related were interesting. I ended up liking the rest of the classes quite a bit, and those included GIS courses. GIS was about the only thing I could do with that degree out of undergrad so I did it.

I also developed a love for epidemiology at that time as I was in a medical geography research group, and planned on getting a masters in epi. 10 years later, I’m doing it! I’m hoping to eventually go on to a PhD in spatial epidemiology.