Cartographic Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2014–2017

Do not go to grad school unless you're sick of having a job. If you want to learn how to make nice maps, you're on your own. Graduate map education = writing dull PDFs about maps, not making nice maps.

Well why'd you go, dummy?

I emailed Nat Geo magazine in 2013 and asked "how do I get hired?" My correspondent said "Most of my colleagues have University degrees in geography, about half at the graduate level." I had a B.A. in International Relations and was working as a graphics editor at Businessweek. A carto M.S. seemed like a good shortcut.

In 2013 I could find ~six unis in the U.S. who still awarded master's degrees in cartography. I took the GRE (170 verbal, 157 quant, 5.0 analytical, 3.5 undergrad GPA), visited University of Oregon, Oregon State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Penn State.

I applied to University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Penn State.

I was accepted at Penn State, but I'd have to pay for it. Nix! I got into UW-Madison with two years' free tuition, $9k/year stipend. A free degree and I was working remotely on Manhattan wages so I lived like a king. Very lucky!

Here's what I saw from September 2014 to January 2017:

• The bad
• 10% of miserly $9k/year stipend lost to mandatory "segregated fees," i.e. "what UW spends to entice teenagers," i.e. "that rock climbing wall in the student union you never use."
• Academics will not hesitate to waste your time.
• The geography grad studies committee chaired by Prof. Mason told me "your two remote sensing classes don't count for your breadth requirement, you gotta stay an extra semester and take two more classes to get your diploma." I appealed and they relented (the student handbook and department head Prof. Naughton were on my side), but it ruined my month.
• Even the "nevermind" email was bizarre. "The Committee agreed that the use of these Remote Sensing courses to fulfill the geography breadth requirement for the MS-Cartography/GIS is inconsistent with the original intent of that requirement. However, because our communication about the breadth requirement (i.e. a 90s-era unpublished document that no one had seen before) has not been as detailed as it should be, we also agreed to allow you to use Geog 371 and 372 to meet it with the understanding that we will make sure that the intent of the requirement is clear in the future." Not my problem!
• I asked Prof. Zhu to let me test out of "GEOG 377: intro to GIS," which is just 12 weeks of "can you use ArcMap?" At that time, I had used ArcMap professionally. He declined, helpfully explaining that "if GIS students have to take cartography classes, cartography students have to take GIS classes." I turned in all twelve labs in 3 days. He still required that I attend class (taught exclusively by his RA) and take the final.
• Prof. Zhu teaches GEOG 578: GIS applications, wherein groups of students pick a topic, write up a GIS analysis, and present it to the class. He's more concerned about your PowerPoint aesthetics than whatever argument your "GIS analysis" is making. Learned nothing.
• This class was so bad I kept a contemporaneous log to dump into the class eval at the end:
  • Sep 22: had us read pre-proposals aloud when they could have been emailed ahead of time.
  • Mandatory labs are extended lecture hours (i.e. reading slides) with redundant material.
  • Slow pace. Given clear guidelines and deliverables, our group could have finished our project in 3 weeks instead of 12.
  • Sep 29: presented our project concepts. Prof scolded us for hewing too closely to directions and for reading our slides, which is what we were instructed to do for the last assignment. Hassled us about PowerPoint animations.
  • Nov 17: hassled for not following directions closely enough on our progress report, said "any problem is an opportunity to do something fancy," which is baldly wrong. You do what's expedient because your time is not unlimited. He hasn't had a job in a while, I suspect.
  • October 6: lab time, which is mandatory for a full participation grade, used as extended lecture time for our group to do pseudo coding. Bad use of time.
• Prof. Zhu teaches GEOG 579: GIS and Spatial Analysis, an online-only course. Multiple-choice quizzes comprise all graded work. Most test questions involve linear algebra; I know nothing about linear algebra. I guessed my way to an A-.
• Prof. Roth teaches "GEOG 370: intro to cartography," the only cartography class I attended over 5 semesters. Exams required students to memorize a whole lot about map semiotics. Boring! If I wanted to write papers about maps it's good to know the jargon, but I wanted to make nice maps.
• I was a TA for Prof. Kang’s softball online breadth course for ~150 teenagers, GEOG 170: Our Digital Globe. I rewrote 3x very undemanding labs. These kids were paying serious money to "attend" a class that asked them to skim ~2,000 words in HTML, email three screenshots, and click "submit" on three multiple-choice quizzes. That’s it. I spoke to one out of 150 students; 99% of my TA duties were emails and clicking around in the CMS.
• During my exit interview with the grad program director I said something like "Students get nothing out of our online classes. It's lazy on our part too, they don't see their instructor once." She said something to the effect of thanks for the input, the department will offer way more online classes.
• The good
• Prof. Schneider and TA Ryan Sword offer two rigorous classes on using orbital spectroradiometers to make educated guesses about gross earth surface trends ("environmental remote sensing").
• Prof. Schneider didn't have a lot of spare time, but she spent a good amount of it ensuring I graduated: she heard I dropped my other remote sensing thesis, emailed "you're good at RS, don't quit," gave me a softball ML + remote sensing project of her own design that I could turn into a 70p PDF. I trained C4.5 on a bit of training data and used it to find "urban land cover change" in 90x Landsat tiles covering Laos (there is no urban land cover change in Laos). It was something a bright undergrad could do. I was not her student, not paid out of her bucket, just a guy who took her classes. It was a true out-of-the-blue kindness that I could not repay; I gave her husband my bicycle when I graduated and moved away.
• Non-faculty (but worth 100 of them), Tanya Buckingham managed the cartography lab, a cozy attic with old desks and old computers. If you were an undergrad or grad student who wanted to learn to make National Geographic-quality maps (like she did), she would provide close-range training and guidance. If you were faculty and needed a nice map for your poster sesh, she’d pair you with a good cartographer. Even if you were not affiliated with UW-M and you needed a map, she’d find you a cartographer. She provided the one space in the UW-Madison geography department where you could learn the craft of mapmaking. She provided a desk to cartographer Daniel Huffman; if not for her, I wouldn't have been able to sit next to Daniel for 18 months and benefit from his instruction. I was starving, Tanya was the soil, Daniel was the barley.
• Tanya steered me into National Geographic Magazine as a 2015 summer geography intern. I published five pages of maps across two issues. I got unimpeachable portfolio cred, hit the summit thanks to Tanya! Couldn't have asked for more.
• Daniel Huffman was the only person at UW-Madison besides Tanya interested in making and teaching beautiful maps. His instruction extends at all ranges: Daniel writes thorough tutorials for his site. He taught the GEOG 370 introductory cartography class when the main prof was unavailable. I even saw him teach an impromptu "let's go from confusing database to nice shaded relief" class for anyone who was hanging around the cartography lab that day.
• Most important, Daniel tolerated my stupid questions for 2 years and taught me, elbow to elbow, how to make beautiful maps. I'm not as generous as Daniel. I don't write tutorials. I don't provide good feedback on Twitter. I don't edit cartographic journals, or give actually-useful conference presentations, or let people watch me work. Few have his generosity and talent. In word and deed, he wants to make more map makers. He has never stopped saying "cartography is not magic, it is practice, and you have to start practicing." A real blessing, I hope to propagate at least 1% of that spirit.
• Every Friday emeritus (nay, ancient) Prof. Tuan would shuffle down to the weekly guest lecture. Tuan is apparently a legendary geographer, I dunno, I've never read his stuff. The guests were PhD candidates from other unis who’d click through a PPT about Baltimore crime or soil science or Bangladeshi labor migration (academic geography is an overlarge tent.) At the end, Prof. Tuan would always ask a sixty-second probing philosophical question about their field. Every presenter was befuddled, totally caught out. I dunno why but it made me smile; if you're gonna be in the academy, be an Academic, not a button pusher or PowerPoint chimp.
• Because the UW-Madison M.S. Cartography & GIS program was 10% as demanding as my Manhattan office job, I had time to barbell 5x5 in UW's sweet gym with twelve squat racks. Gained 15lb of muscle in 20 months.
• One of the lavish student unions had a real theater that screened movies a few times a week. I got to see Apocalypse Now for the first time on a 30ft screen with a Trader Joe's bag full of popcorn I brought from home.
• The USGS paid for my flight to the 2015 ICA conference in Rio de Janeiro. Conference sucked, stood by my poster on making editorial maps for 45 minutes, spent the rest of the trip in Brazilian sunshine.
• Horticulture club: pruned an apple tree (badly), met some bees, cover-cropped the student farm with rye, attended 2x Midwest Organic Farming Conferences in La Crosse for free. It was great, learned about mechanical weed control, how to handle powdery mildew, integrated pest management (predators...), other stuff I'll never use because farming is hard. The conferences were great because 1) none of the computerguy conferences I’d attended had healthy, ruddy people 2) tables covered in organic cheese, apples and nuts 3) learned to contra dance.

At university, you can learn whatever you want: I'd attend class, do my assignments at the library, then sit in other departments' guest presentations. I learned that 17% of insurance buyers eligible for flood coverage actually buy it (59% of customers for terrorism insurance actually buy that), traditional Mongolian liquor is distilled from big vats of yogurt, e coli strains 0157 and 0104 are dangerous because they excrete shigatoxin, a gene they picked up from phages that reproduced lysogenically inside shigella bacteria, and then the phages then incorporated their genomes into e coli on the next infection cycle, larval chrysomelidae beetles eat bergamot (usually toxic to bugs) and collect their shit into a little club that repels predators, axolotls evolved in niches with very little iodine, the fur of 3-toed sloths hosts an algae that grows nowhere else (the sloths lick the algae off), pawpaw flowers smell terrible because they’re pollinated by carrion insects like beetles and flies, spiny water flea ruined Lake Mendota by eating all the daphnia (daphnia eats algae, which keeps the water clear), leaf-cutter ants don’t eat the leaves but instead carry them to their colony's fungus garden, and then the ants eat the fungus, but the fungus gets attacked by a smaller fungus, so the ants carry bacterial colonies on their bodies that feed off a gland on the ants, and the bacteria kill the bad fungus that kills the good fungus, and so on.