As I progress through my Bachelor's program at SAIT I have noted how much time we spend with ArcGIS Pro. I don't necessarily see this as a huge problem, as it is a dominant force with the GIS sphere, and while we are largely focussed on it as a tool, there are underlying concepts being taught as well. However, to make us as saleable and knowledgeable as possible, I believe SAIT should look into introducing the members of the program a little of these other tools.
I know the obvious choice here is QGIS. While I agree that within this program we could, perhaps even *SHOULD* learn something about QGIS, it is not the tool I wanted to talk about briefly today.
Within my day to day work as a geological technologist with an oil & gas company, I became one of the people who helped build visualizations with TIBCO's Spotfire, at first this was simply adding on and working with an existing dashboard, but as we progressed I was required to learn more. This is where I first ran into R. It had some intriguing ideas in it, but to be honest, at this time I only scratched the surface, learning just enough to accomplish the task at hand. This was before I had started back to school as well.
Since that time I have been more formally adopted into the data analytics team, which has again prompted me to look into R a little deeper. Simultaneously the courses within the BGIS program began looking into statistics again.
So now I am sitting here wondering why this easily accessible statistics and data science-oriented language with a strong GIS toolset isn't being taught, at least as a footnote somewhere.
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