GIS Internship Student Spotlight

GIS4944/5945, GIS Internship, Instructor, Mrs. Leah Lewis, GISP

GIS Internships - Let's get to work!

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT AWARDS

The following student was chosen to highlight their current GIS internship experience.  

Jody Steffel

About Jody: Jody works for the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative. She work with the GIS needs of the cooperative and is taking the GIS Certification course of help fill in the blanks for those areas that she is unfamiliar with. She enjoys the challenge of finding ways to use GIS at work and to "think outside the box" to build projects that others in Agriculture have not done. Jody would consider myself a vector as she is coordinating and connecting points to keep things rolling in the Agricultural Department with working alongside with 13 men and 525 shareholders. As part of her job, Jody creates continuous surface maps from yeild data, soil test information and growing season precipitation using Geostatisitical Analyst for the shareholder database book. She also uses Landsat and Deimos imagery to estimate crop yield and utilizes Rapid Eye imagety for estimating final Tons/Acre during harvest. This is only a small bit of what Jody does, there is still so much more! Who would have thought beets would provide such a great use of GIS? Congratulations, Jody, for making the spotlight!

Just for fun, some facts about beets:

• Beets are a "good mood food". Beets contain betaine, a substance that relaxes the mind and is used in other forms to treat depression. It also contains trytophan which is also found in chocolate and contributes to a sense of well being.
• You can use beet juice to measure acidity. When added to an acidic solution it turns pink, but when it is added to an alkali it turns yellow.
• In 1975, during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, cosmonauts from the USSR’s Soyuz 19 welcomed the Apollo 18 astronauts by preparing a banquet of borscht (beet soup) in zero gravity.