Esri Young Professionals Network Blog

Once a year at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) geographers from across disciplines come together to discuss cross cutting research, engage with new GIS technologies, network across disciplines, and witness the famous World Geography Bowl.

The Chattanooga Tree Project (CTP) (https://www.chattanoogatreeproject.org/) is a partnership between the city of Chattanooga, the Center for Geospatial Data Science (CAGDS – also known as the “GIS Center”) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), and two conservation and community-oriented non-profits: Understory by Green|Spaces and the Southeast Conservation Corps. The partnership was formed to plant thousands of trees in Chattanooga, Tennessee to alleviate the impacts of elevated surface temperatures associated with high levels of imperviousness and multi-decadal canopy loss within the city.

AI is rapidly evolving; how is it impacting GIS? I wrote about my academic journey and how integrating AI has optimized my workflows (and how it can helped me be a better ArcGIS user).

In February 2026, I had the privilege of serving as a Student Assistant at the annual Conference in Washington D.C. Surrounded by GIS professionals across federal agencies, private industry, and academia, I found myself immersed in conversations that reflected the true power and potential of geospatial science.

In this blog I highlight my experience and key takeaways as a student assistant at Esri FedGIS.

10 practical tips to help you prioritize, organize, and build meaningful connections with your teammates and your business as the only GIS person at your company.

If you are a student or emerging GIS professional, you have probably asked yourself how a career in GIS will change, given that AI can analyze data, generate maps, and write code faster than any individual.

Technological changes like AI, cloud computing and the massive growth in available spatial data have led educators to develop a new paradigm for GIS curriculum: The Guide to the Geographic Approach.

The Guide to the Geographic Approach is a new GIS curriculum that helps students understand why a problem matters and how spatial approaches can lead to solutions.

Picture this: you have a stack of aging GIS scripts that need to be migrated to a modern platform. The old code is tangled with outdated dependencies, spread across multiple files, and documentation is nowhere to be found. You know what the end result needs to look like, but the path from here to there feels long. This is a scenario most GIS professionals have faced at some point, and it is exactly the kind of problem where AI tools have proven genuinely transformative in my work — not as a replacement for expertise, but as a powerful amplifier of it.

Transitioning from student to professional is not necessarily taught in a college classroom and often is learned from experience and trial and error.

Having attended over 32 conferences and coming up on a decade as a professional marketer, I've compiled the top 5 most effective ways you can present yourself as a GIS professional that will open doors to growth opportunities.