Meet the Board - Sandi Majewski, GISP

Hello – my name is Sandi Majewski and I am currently in my third year of service on the URISA Board of Directors.  

URISA has been home to me since 1991 – my first conference in San Francisco.  I was just a greenhorn in URISA in those days, but let me assure you, not in GIS!!  I believe that I was born a geographer!!  I was fascinated by patterns of all sorts – and what is geography but the study of distributions and patterns?  I have been studying patterns ever since.

My studies and life have taken me around the US in a succession of wildly diverse experiences.  I received my undergraduate degree from Towson University, Maryland – where I was introduced to the wonderful world of CARTOGRAPHY, although in those days, all mapping was accomplished on velum with Leroy ink pens (yes Virginia, I really am that old!!)   My studies continued in graduate school at the University of Arizona where I earned my MA in Geography and fell in love with the desert. 

Throughout my career, I have worked in a wide variety of positions – from collecting data on historic sites, transportation plans, zoning changes, flooding conditions, and socioeconomic information to interpreting and analyzing aerial photography, land use, transit conditions, and radiological data.  Early in my career, I even got to work on one of the first state-wide GIS systems, a cooperative effort between the State of Maryland, NASA, and ESRI, called MAGIS – the Maryland Automated Geographic Information System.

In 1999, I changed careers once again when I joined the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept as a Crime Analyst.  Crime is just another type of pattern – although as I have often stated, “radiation follows basic laws of physics – humans, not so much!”  I still get to map because when a criminal is capering, mapping the crimes can really help distinguish patterns.

The question that I am often asked is “How are all these divergent careers related??”  My answer is – all of my careers have consisted of two basic components – analyzing various types of data patterns and using GIS!!