{"id":66832,"date":"2019-02-01T14:25:58","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T22:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=66832"},"modified":"2023-07-28T16:48:21","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T23:48:21","slug":"pioneer-in-enterprise-gis-education-makes-sure-each-student-succeeds","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/pioneer-in-enterprise-gis-education-makes-sure-each-student-succeeds","title":{"rendered":"Pioneer in Enterprise GIS Education Makes Sure Each Student Succeeds"},"author":1312,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10372],"tags":[28932,165132,165122,165142,165152],"arcnews_issues":[32862],"class_list":["post-66832","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gis-hero","tag-gis-education","tag-sciences","tag-spatial","tag-students","tag-usc","arcnews_issues-winter-2018","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"Jennifer Swift, an associated professor of spatial sciences (teaching) at the University of Southern California, is this issue\u2019s GIS hero.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Every year at the Esri Developer Summit (DevSummit) in Palm Springs, California, Jennifer Swift can be seen ducking in and out of user presentations, sitting rapt in technical talks, and talking shop with colleagues while walking the halls of the convention center. She often has two or three wide-eyed conference neophytes in tow\u2014her students from the University of Southern California\u2019s (USC) Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI). In a conference center full of strangers and people who only see each other once a year, their esprit de corps can be infectious. Yet sometimes, it\u2019s the first time these students have ever met Swift or each other."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":66842,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Every year at the Esri Developer Summit (DevSummit) in Palm Springs, California, Jennifer Swift can be seen ducking in and out of user presentations, sitting rapt in technical talks, and talking shop with colleagues while walking the halls of the convention center. She often has two or three wide-eyed conference neophytes in tow\u2014her students from the University of Southern California\u2019s (USC) Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI). In a conference center full of strangers and people who only see each other once a year, their esprit de corps can be infectious. Yet sometimes, it\u2019s the first time these students have ever met Swift or each other.\r\n\r\nSwift, an associate professor of spatial sciences (teaching) at SSI, teaches undergraduate students in the residential USC GeoDesign program, as well as Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) courses to USC master\u2019s students\u2014all online. Her graduate students, who are generally a few years or more out of college and have significant work experience, span the United States. But with a dose of persistence, Swift convinces a handful of them to travel to Palm Springs each year to present their GIS work at DevSummit.\r\n\r\n\u201cI encourage them by explaining what the DevSummit is,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s so cool. It\u2019s geek heaven!\u201d\r\n\r\nBy taking the time to talk her students into going\u2014sending a mass email first, then personally following up with all her best programming students from the previous year\u2014she can usually persuade four to six of them to attend the summit.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt always amazes the other faculty because we don\u2019t pay\u2014the students have to pay for everything,\u201d she pointed out.\r\n\r\nEven so, over the years, Swift has had 20 students present at DevSummit, 38 demonstrate their work at the Esri User Conference, and many more exhibit at other conferences across the United States.\r\n\r\n\u201cHer students are special,\u201d said Esri\u2019s global education manager Michael Gould, who usually goes out to dinner with the group during DevSummit. \u201cThey\u2019ve chosen, as working adults, to\u2026get a master\u2019s in GIS at USC and apply it to their work. They realize that\u00a0[attending these conferences]<\/em>\u00a0is a networking opportunity. They know that this is where the action is and where they may get a job and\u2026make some professional contacts.\u201d\r\n\r\nSwift ensures that they get those opportunities as well, facilitating meetings between her students and Esri staff from around the world and posting photos of the job boards online for them to peruse. She also fosters camaraderie among the normally geographically dispersed students, encouraging them to attend one another\u2019s presentations and, once, even participating with them in the summit\u2019s much-anticipated closing activity: a curiously competitive dodgeball tournament.\r\n\r\n\u201cA couple years ago\u2026we all had evaluated so many sessions that we got to skip the first round,\u201d Swift recalled. \u201cSo we made it to the second round\u2014and we got creamed!\u201d\r\n\r\nTheir sporting missteps notwithstanding, Swift is devoted to making sure that all her students flourish.\r\n\r\n\u201cRather than teaching to the top and letting the rest of the students fall off the bottom, she wants every student to succeed,\u201d said Karen Kemp, a professor of the practice of spatial sciences at USC\u2019s SSI. \u201cShe works very, very hard to make sure that her materials are thorough and complete.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd she\u2019s doing it online, which is even more difficult,\u201d said Gould.\r\n\r\nBut Swift, who is currently the program director of the institute\u2019s Esri Development Center, seems to be a natural at facilitating distance learning.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnline students are happy if you just respond\u2026if they don\u2019t feel like they\u2019re alone out there,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nHer ability to give students this kind of attention, despite not being in the same location, may very well stem from how she got her PhD. After completing her undergraduate degree in geochemistry at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, attaining a master\u2019s degree in geology from the University of Northern Illinois, and getting some work experience in consulting, Swift jumped at an opportunity to get her PhD in geophysics at one of Turkey\u2019s top universities while studying the North Anatolian Fault\u2014without knowing a lick of Turkish beforehand.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was young, and I could simply do it,\u201d she exclaimed. \u201cMy parents had a heart attack, but I\u2019m good at staying in touch.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe took Turkish language classes on weekends and eventually gained fluency. But all the curriculum at Bogazi\u00e7i University was in English. Her research team spoke English, too.\r\n\r\nAnd that\u2019s what really drew her to Turkey\u2014the chance to study the fault zone, which is similar in structure and behavior to Southern California\u2019s San Andreas Fault system but, by comparison at the time, offered new and unique opportunities for earthquake studies. Whenever there was an earthquake in the area, she and the team from the university\u2019s Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute would pack all their stuff up and drive, for example, to eastern Turkey, where they would conduct field reconnaissance for weeks, using GIS for some of the work. Other teams would be flown in from all over the world, especially the United States.\r\n\r\n\u201cI would start making friends with these people,\u201d Swift recalled. \u201cIt was unusual for them to see a female American graduate student studying there.\u201d\r\n\r\nAfter receiving her PhD and teaching in the observatory at the university for three additional years\u2014spending a total of nine years in Turkey\u2014she used the contacts she met there out in the field to get her first projects when she returned to the United States.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe path of a career, if you\u2019re lucky, follows your heart through your own creativity,\u201d said Swift. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just as often based on opportunities. A research opportunity will come up through networking that you never anticipated.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhich is exactly what happened. After tossing up a few employment ideas, she ended up taking a postdoctoral research position at USC.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe professors who were inviting me were very well-known, and I thought, if I don\u2019t do this now, I may not get another chance,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nSwift started out doing small research projects in USC\u2019s civil engineering department, where she learned and kept up with Esri technology. She ended up also team teaching an online course for the geography department and then switched to it altogether\u2014just as geography at USC was undergoing a major transformation.\r\n\r\nThe department only had a few full-time faculty at the time, and in lieu of rebuilding it, the university elected to establish SSI in 2010. In 2011, Swift became its founding director of graduate studies.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe position was based largely on my effort to support\u00a0[SSI director]<\/em>\u00a0John Wilson and all the faculty in the initial creation of the institute,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nBeing extremely well versed in USC\u2019s online learning platforms, such as Blackboard, plus Esri technology, Swift wrote a great deal of documentation to make it easier for faculty to teach.\r\n\r\n\u201cFor example, we started hosting all our Esri software on virtual machines,\u201d she said. \u201cI wrote all the documentation for our instructors and students so everyone had the same documentation to work from.\u201d\r\n\r\nAccording to both Kemp and Gould, that is where Swift really shines\u2014not only in setting up enterprise systems, though, but in teaching enterprise GIS as well."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":66852,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cShe\u2019s been essential in having our enterprise GIS roll out as well as it does and in making sure that it addresses the needs of our students, which is what it\u2019s for,\u201d said Kemp.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s been a pioneer in utilizing cloud computing and virtual machines so that each student has their own environment to experiment with,\u201d remarked Gould.\r\n\r\nAnd somehow, Swift has figured out how to teach such a complex subject to students no matter where they\u2019re located or how competent they are in coding.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe believes it\u2019s possible to teach this stuff\u2014this really difficult, abstract, technical material\u2014to everybody,\u201d added Kemp.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s been great. Lots of fun,\u201d Swift reflected."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"Read other articles in the\u00a0GIS Heroes<\/a> series.","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nPioneer in Enterprise GIS Education Makes Sure Each Student Succeeds | Winter 2018 | ArcNews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jennifer Swift, an associated professor of spatial sciences (teaching) at the University of Southern California, is this issue\u2019s GIS hero.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/pioneer-in-enterprise-gis-education-makes-sure-each-student-succeeds\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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