PathSource - PROJECT MANAGER, MAPS & NATURE: Understand How Things Are Made

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PROJECT MANAGER, MAPS & NATURE: Understand How Things Are Made

About this video

Dan is a Project Manager for a web design and mapping company, and he also works at Nerds for Nature, which brings together people who love both technology and nature. He describes his current work, along with his journey from journalism to wanting to be an English professor, to environmental advocacy.

Degree: Journalism

Job Title: Project Manager

Job Summary: Surveying and Mapping Technicians

Job Description

Surveying and mapping technicians assist surveyors and cartographers in collecting data and making maps of the earth's surface. Surveying technicians visit sites to take measurements of the land. Mapping technicians use geographic data to create maps.

On-the-Job Training

Significant on the job training can be expected for entry level workers and apprenticeships are not uncommon.

Certification Requirement

Required by the Certified Survey Technician credential

Quick Facts

Average salary

National Statistic Change Location

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$25,000 - $60,000

Projected Job Growth

10 to 20 percent

Typical schedule

Full-time

Typical workplace

Indoor, Office, Outdoor

Personal Qualities

Teamwork, Technical skills, Detail oriented, Likes working with hands

Educational Path

Education Requirement

Bachelor's degree

Recommended Education Degree

Bachelor's degree

Recommended Majors

Geography
Surveying Engineering

Related Careers

Cartographers and Photogrammetrists
Drafters
Surveyors

View Detailed Career Data

PathSource provides free English transcriptions for each of our informational interviews on video which will appear here after you have signed in. Our advanced transcriptions are highly interactive. They scroll down automatically as the video plays and users can jump to a specific part of the video by clicking on any word in the transcript.

For a small fee, we offer transcriptions in different languages, making PathSource a great tool for English Language Learners. This feature is currently available for customers in the education field only.

Please contact us at support@pathsoruce.com if you have any questions or would like to get a price quote for advanced transcripts offered in a second language.

P3.instances[0].transcript.parse_transcript_data({"transcript":"So my name is Dan Rademacher. During the day, I work for a web design and mapping company called Stamen Design. And on the nights and weekends, I work for this, Nerds for Nature, which is an all-volunteer group that brings together technology with people who love the natural world to come up with good ideas about what could make the world a better place. During the day, I work at the design firm, at Stamen. We work with anywhere from eight to 10 clients at a time who are trying to get help, say, mapping the trails of this park that we're in right now, Golden Gate National Recreation Area. We did that last fall. So getting data, contacting people. I'm project manager, so I'm mostly just helping other people who are building maps. Writing computer code is what that really means, writing computer code, designing what the map should look like in Photoshop or Illustrator, computer programs. And I'm just communicating with everybody, trying to make sure everybody's getting done what they need to get done. So a lot of what I do for Nerds for Nature is help plan big events, where we have hundreds of people come out and look for plants and animals all throughout a park. And so a lot of that is just trying to keep in contact with people by phone and email, in person, to put together schedules and make sure they know where they should be when, and that they feel like the event itself is coming together in a fun way that has meaning for them. And that when they're logging species observations of wildlife, plants, animals, fungi, that that's going to go somewhere and mean something and make a difference, which it does because scientists use it all the time. It's not a straight education career path for me. I was a student journalist in high school and college, which I highly recommend. It was amazing. Ran the student newspaper at my college. Then I tried to get a PhD in English literature. I was going to become an English Professor. And eventually, I decided it was not connected enough to things that made enough difference quickly for me. I wanted to make a bigger difference in the world more quickly. So then I became an environmental journalist for a couple of different small magazines. I wrote articles and edited other people's articles, and commissioned photography of parks and places in the natural world. And as that changed and people read less and less in print, I moved over into technology and websites and interactive maps and stuff like that, all with the idea of helping people understand and connect with the world around them, whether that's nature or other people or cities or whatever. Well, if you're interested in this field, my advice is and my personal experience has been to really understand as much as you can about how the publication or website or event gets made. And get involved in as many ways as you can at whatever scale that you're at. So I started doing student journalism and small events in college, activism-type stuff. But I was always there for every stage of, whether it was putting together the newspaper with the software that needed to happen, getting it to the printer or organizing the event. How do we reach people? How do we make posters? How do we do all that stuff? Being right in the thick of all that mechanics of how this stuff gets done. So that when it came time to walk in the door and be a volunteer somewhere, they saw like, wow. This guy can make our magazine. Let's hire him. Because I just wanted to pick up as many practical skills as I could. And each one of them, maybe, is hard work, but it leads towards this ability to be the person who gets things done and makes things happen. And then you get hired. ","file":{"id":381913,"video_id":"3408754830001","name":"2430-Dan-MapsNerdforNature1","duration":212486,"thumbnail_url":null}});