Student Spotlight: Hunter Fishback

Student Spotlight : Hunter Fishback

From Bartender to GIS Professional

We’re excited to spotlight one of our recent Graduate GIS Certificate completers, Hunter Fishback, and celebrate his successful career transition into the geospatial field.

Before starting the program, Hunter earned his degree in Environmental Science from the University of Florida. Like many recent graduates, he weighed career options and chose bartending for the reliable pay. But after several conversations with regulars who saw his potential, he was encouraged to look into GIS. That advice ultimately led him to our online GIS Certificate program, which fit his schedule and career goals.

Just two semesters into the program, Hunter landed his first GIS position this past March—an impressive milestone while still working toward completing the certificate. This summer, he finished strong by completing the GIS Internship course with his new employer, officially graduating with the Graduate GIS Certificate.

As part of the internship, students build their professional online presence. Hunter’s LinkedIn profile is an excellent example of how to showcase transferable skills, highlight relevant GIS experience, and present a polished, professional image. His thoughtful approach to his profile, combined with his active engagement, reflects both his dedication and enthusiasm for his new career path.

We’re thrilled to celebrate Hunter’s success and look forward to seeing where his GIS journey takes him next.

Click the Land Use and Land Cover Map above from Hunter's Blog Site to link to his blog and see entries from his Graduate Certificate journey.

 Connect with Hunter here: Hunter Fishback on LinkedIn

Student Spotlight: Maha Habbal

GIS 5103 Module 6: Working with Geometries

GIS Programming students in this summer's session of GIS 5103 Module 6 recently tackled Working with Geometries.  This important module introduces concepts for using ArcPy to access a feature's geometry object. ArcPy provides a variety of classes which allow scripts to access geometry components such as SHAPE, LENGTH, XY coordinants and more. As part of this lesson, students wrote a Python script that generates a formatted text file otuputting each river feature within a feature class. 

This week, we would like to highlight the outstanding work of Maha Habbal!  Maha works as a GIS Analyst for the City of Tampa Mobility Department where she collaborates with engineers, planners, AutoCad Technicians. Her expertise is appreciated as she helps fellow students answer their questions and participates regularly in class discussion forums. She is an excellent student and we enjoy her well written blog posts, as well. 

Read Maha Habbal's complete GIS Journal blog here! 

Student Spotlight: Jennifer Melcher

GIS 5007 Module 5: Choropleth Mapping

GIS5007 Computer Cartography Module 5 tackled the subject of Choropleth Mapping. Choropleth mapping is used to visualize data such as population density, health statistics, or economic statistics using color and shading to represent values throughout a geographic boundary. This module asked students to map population densities along with total wine consumption among European countries.  They chose color schemes, data classification schemes as well as proportional symbols to effectively communicate the data. 

We would like to highlight the excellent work of Jennifer Melcher on this assignment! She is a Graduate Certificate student and an experienced Archaeologist with the UWF Archaeology Institute. 

Jennifer went the extra mile by designing a custom picture symbol with open source resource https://www.svgrepo.com/.  She also took additional steps to customize a color palette with palleton.com to get the look she needed to best represent the data. Jennifer applied her SQL skills to filter records and dynamically adjust the size and color shades of annotation for maximum readability and visual impact.  Melcher's attention to detail and extra efforts on this Module were greatly appreciated and we love the results! 

Click on the map above for a closer look and to read Jennifer Melcher's blot post about this module.  You may also see more about her GIS journey at Jennifer's GIS Blog.