The Beginning
I was hired out of school and started my career with British Petroleum, who at the time was instigating a GIS program. During my time at SAIT I took a single GIS course focusing on ArcGIS, which I soon learned placed me ahead of most of my direct colleagues. I worked with other software but was on of the technologists that had a grasp of the GIS concepts.
With the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with Deepwater Horizon, BP liquidated a lot of their Canadian holdings. I became an employee of Apache Canada for the next iteration of my career. I moved from a place that had a few technologists who knew GIS to being the only GIS capable tech. I quickly became the main GIS and ArcGIS contact within the development & exploration portion of the company.
Eventually Apache exited Canada and the next phase of my career began. Much of Apache Canada was purchased by Paramount Resources Canada, and shortly after that our primary GIS software, ArcGIS was discontinued to save money, as I was the only user in our department it made sense. From this point we would use Global Mapper for our GIS needs.
It is important to note that many other software packages utilize concepts that I learned about in my time within GIS, mainly coordinate systems and datums. Having this knowledge was certainly a boon as these features became more and more common place in software such as Petrel and Spotfire.
Back to School
Right now my career spans 10+ years as a geological technologist within the oil and gas sector. My general day to day work involves data transfers, modification, script creation and automation, data loading and basic GIS spatial analysis. At SAIT things had developed and I watched with interest as they rolled out the Applied degree program. I saw a way to leverage my 2 year diploma into a Bachelor degree, something I had failed to achieve as a young man straight out of high school.One of the appealing aspects of this new program was the ability to take it completely online. One of the things that held me back from signing up was that I had to physically go to SAIT to actually sign up. As our world changed with the COVID-19 Pandemic and we were forced to transition to a more online model in both work and play SAIT made online registration possible, and as I had more time on my hands, I enrolled in the winter of 2021, starting my classes in January.
In January I took GEOS 409 and GEOS 410 and completed both with 90%+ or an A+ and maintained my GPA of 4.0. Once these would completed I took COMM 415 and GEOS 406 which were also completed with A+s and a GPA of 4.0.
It is now September 4, 2021 with Fall classes beginning in a few days. This semester I have opted to take a single class as the workload of 2 classes and full time work is high, and I will have less time to devote to school as we transition back to the office. I am hoping to get a solid routine completed so I can return to 2 classes a semester so I can have the academic portion of the degree completed by the end of the Winter 2023 semester.
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