Real world GIS projects needed for University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education’s GIS Certificate Program Students. NWGIS member Steve Savage and Leah Saunders, instructors for the UW GIS Certificate program, are seeking project ideas from NWGIS members for the 2024/2025 academic year. If you have a GIS project or task that might be a good fit for the students of the GIS Certificate Program to work on, please contact Leah Saunders at lsaundersuw@outlook.com by Tuesday October 15th. This would benefit students in getting applied GIS real work experience and will benefit you in getting some GIS work products completed by the students for your organization.

What would make a good student project?

· Size: should be appropriate for a 3-4 (maybe 5) student project team

· Schedule: Project selection takes place during October and November. Students begin working on the projects in January as Winter quarter begins and deliverables are completed and turned over to the sponsor at the conclusion of the program in early June.

· Content: in order to offer the students quality learning opportunities, a project should not be limited to a single activity such as data development or data editing/collection. Opportunities to perform any of the following help increase the learning value of the experience: database design, data collection, mapping/cartography, spatial analysis, ArcGIS Online application development, etc.

· Sponsorship: some of our best projects have been real-world practical projects submitted by organizations from around the region (including, in the past, from Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska). These projects are typically efforts that the sponsoring organization has wanted to act on, but, until now, has been unable to address due to their own limited resources.

· Time commitment for sponsors: this does not need to be a great impact on you. Some students interview their sponsors to assess the needs and requirements, and then work independently from that point forward. Other projects have very active sponsors who may meet regularly with the student team, and is involved in reviewing documents, providing feedback, and other activities. Regardless of the level of involvement, sponsors will receive periodic status reports from the team as the projects progress.

Benefits to You

· Getting projects and/or tasks that have been lingering on the back-burner for some time completed.

· Get those projects moving and, at the same time, provide valuable experience for the students.

· New initiatives that you haven’t had time to start with GIS applications, web, field or other work products.

Work Quality

The program focuses on practical and professional execution of projects in a way that strongly mimics how a project would be executed in the workplace. We have had great success with the vast majority of our projects and many have gone on to win awards at the annual WAGISA (formerly WAURISA) conference and other conferences.

How to get Started

If you have a project in mind, here are the details that is needed to get started:

· Sponsor name and contact information

· Name of proposed project

· Brief description of proposed project (a short paragraph is ideal)

Ideally, they would like to hear from you on or before Wednesday October 9th, as students will begin discussing projects towards the end of October, and by mid-November all projects will have been selected. However, if you think of a project later than that, proposals could be accepted as late as October 18th.

Please feel free to contact Leah at lsaundersuw@outlook.com, even if your proposal idea needs some refining. The Instructor team is happy to work with you on this to come up with a good solution for all parties, and we can provide past project examples of provided for context.

Posted on behalf of Steve Savage