Natasha Sadoff
I graduated from the OSU Geography department with a master’s degree in 2015. I had a B.S. in environmental studies and natural resources from another university and was working full time in a great role, but for professional reasons, decided to pursue a graduate degree. I did not understand what Geography as a discipline was – as many don’t – and was so pleasantly surprised to find the program, and my advisor, Kendra McSweeney, right across the street from where I worked. I was the only student in my cohort who engaged in the program part time and at times this was palpable in how I engaged with my fellow students and professors, where academia and critical geographic thought or theory were prized. I was also one of only a few who did not plan to go into academia as a profession, and therefore always wanted to look at classwork through the lens of the practicality and application. I struggled with theory and its importance in my career, but it finally clicked when Kendra explained that theory simply sought to explain and frame the patterns and processes that we see repeat in various ways over time and space. I had this theoretical underpinning more thoroughly woven into my thinking via seminars in political ecology, urban geography, development, and neoliberalism, with additional courses in research methods, remote sensing, and GIS. I proudly wrote a thesis on the uneven impacts of waste management and development in Panama and attended several conferences. Though my time on campus was limited due to my full-time job, I also learned an infinite amount from my cohort of fellow students.
In the years since graduating I’m happy to have seen Geography as a discipline become even more prevalent in job ads and more desirable in the industry where I work – environmental management consulting and project management for the private sector for twelve years, and now science communication and satellite data end user engagement for NASA. While I admit that my employers were never explicitly interested in neoliberalism, the writings of Marx or Foucault, or other epistemological and ontological controversies in human geography, I believe they appreciated that my graduate education equipped me with contextualized insight into globalization and development, a critical eye on the collection and analysis of data (and for what purpose), and an understanding of the importance of a political economic lens in geography or geographic thought. My human geography courses at OSU provided me with a toolbox of perspectives and methodological tools with which I could more effectively and equitably carry out my work as a researcher, even (and especially) outside of academia. While I came into the program focused on practice and efficiency in carrying out the government-funded work I was paid to carry out, the most precious concepts I took away were the importance of context, place, and a critical, questioning perspective.
Ying Song
I was graduated from the Ohio State University in 2015 with a PhD degree in Geography and joined University of Minnesota as a tenure-track faculty right afterward. My research aims to advance space-time integration, and I have developed new concepts and methods centered on geographic information science (GISc) and applied them to answering substantive questions in human mobility and sustainable development. My recent research focuses on the smartphone-based activity-travel survey, which allows people to provide rich contextual data about their daily activities and trips in real-time as well as automatically collecting their movement trajectories in space across time. I am using such survey data to understand how a person’s socio-economic background and identity, or one’s sense of self, could lead to distinct travel patterns and health outcomes. My research is currently supported by the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT).
What I have learned and experienced at Ohio State Geography has been benefiting my career development in many ways. My dissertation was part of a large multi-disciplinary project funded by NSF. I participated in all stages of project development, which prepared me well for funding application and project management. I got the chance to collaborate with researchers in fields other than geography and started to learn how to communicate with people outside my research area. More importantly, this valuable experience showed me what it is like working in academia and made me realize how much I love to do research, especially on topics surrounding people, place, pattern, and process.
Beside my dissertation research, I also profited from the colloquiums, GIS day, and other events held by the department, which kept me updated with technology and most demanding research topics. But I must say that the most valuable things the Ohio State Geography brought me were friends and allies. As an international student pursuing a PhD, I still felt quite lonely sometimes despite supports from my adviser and the department. I was lucky since there were many other international students at the Ohio State who shared similar experiences and career goals, and I met and became close friends with some of them. We supported each other in life and at school and spent the holidays together as families. We kept in touch after graduation and even started to work on projects and proposals as a research team.
I am proud that I was once a buckeye. And I will carry those memories at CURA, in Derby Hall, and beyond the Oval with me throughout my life. “Summer's heat or winter's cold. The seasons pass, the years will roll. Time and change will surely show. How firm thy friendship...OHIO!” – Carmen Ohio.