Episode 6: A Celebration of STEM in Industry with an Assistant Planner

Transcript

Welcome to BLaST the Airwaves with BLaST Intermediate Unit 17. Here at BLaST Intermediate Unit 17, we strive to transform lives and communities through educational services. For this season, we have a special guest co-host who is working to create and sustain pathways to employment in our region by uniting her community around common goals in STEM learning. This season’s guests come from 9 counties total, representing different local industries all across Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania. I’d like to introduce you to Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM Services Coordinator for NEIU 19 and current lead of NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Alexandra, welcome! Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be able to work with you for our Celebration of STEM in Industry this year. Our STEM Ecosystem is holding a weeklong series of free events and opportunities highlighting industry partners and the benefits they have in our 5 county region. Our hope is that by listening to the wide variety of employment opportunities available in our region from folks in our community who live it every day, we can shed a light on what’s possible for our young people. On this podcast, we will provide you with educational solutions and resources for all, no matter the learning environment. So teachers, administrators, students, caregivers, industry partners, what are you waiting for? What would happen if we started questioning? What if our students and educators got the opportunities to sit down with members of the community? What if we bridged that gap? What connections would we discover? It’s time to blast the airwaves.
Rebecca: Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Erica Lutz, the Assistant Planner at the Sullivan County Planning office and Alexandra Konsur-Grushinski, STEM Services Coordinator of NEIU 19 and current lead of the NEPA STEM Ecosystem. Erica, Alexandra thanks so much for joining us today to discuss STEM skills used in your industry. Specifically, we will be discussing how knowledge of different STEM skills are important in your current job position. So are you guys ready to BLaST the Airwaves?
Erica: I’m ready.
Alexandra: Ready as I’ll ever be!
Rebecca: Ok. Here we go. So, Erica, why don’t we start by having you tell us a little bit more about your role in your industry.
Erica: Ok. So my job title is GIS Specialist and Assistant Planner which includes assisting the Sullivan County Planning Director and all activities associated with the community development, land management, GIS and economic development. So, it’s a lot of different areas that we cover. Part of that is because of the size of Sullivan County. Because the population is smaller, we are able to cover more of these areas instead of having to have separate offices for each, which I think is a unique opportunity for me because I get to learn a lot about a lot of different areas.
Rebecca: That’s definitely unique so um you cover, you have one office, and you cover all of Sullivan County, correct?
Erica: Correct.
Rebecca: Great.
Alexandra: So, Erica um, I’m interested in having you dig down a little bit into more of what it is that you do, so could you describe for our listeners what your typical day is like?
Erica: Yeah so, every day here is different for us. We never do the same thing every day, which is one thing that I was looking for when I was looking for a job. Of course, I do have monthly tasks, and monthly meetings I need to do, but on a daily basis, we interact with the public and the community pretty much every day about different things. It could be as simple as an email or call helping someone with a simple question, or going out to someone’s property if they’re interested in completing a subdivision or a land development project or going out on visiting a new business in the county. Something else I do almost every single day is used ARCMAP GIS. This is a geospatial processing program that allows me to view, edit, create, analyze, and do different kinds of thinking with the County’s geospatial data. I use this to create maps for different organizations, businesses or I can just be creating a map for a citizen who just wants to be able to hang it in their house. And then, of course, we are a part of different organizations and associations and so we go to those kinds of meetings and we work with a lot of different departments within the county. So, we work with emergency services a lot, and we work with the businesses in the county. We overlap with oil and gas. We are always doing something different which keeps it exciting.
Alexandra: So, Erica, this is fascinating to me, and I don’t know how many of our listeners are familiar with this type of work. So, I’m wondering if you could talk to us as if maybe we weren’t completely about that type of mapping, and maybe explain to us, and me too because I don’t know either, why is GIS mapping important? What is it used for?
Erica: Right. Umm so… On our maps, we have all of the property lines for the county so, if you won a house, you have a property and there’s lines. We have all of those specific details so there’s never any confusion. If someone does have confusion, they can come in and we can help them and show them where the lines are, or if there’s disputes over lines. If property lines change, we change those on the maps. And I should also say that we do have public, maps for the public to view online, and so they can go on and see these property lines if they need to. We also have data. Sullivan County is a very rural county so lots of people come here to go hiking, to go, to World’s End and Ricket’s Glenn. We have all of the information for that. We have where the State Parks are, the State Game Lands are. We also have data on the hydrology with the Loyalsock flooding floodplain areas. Flooding is a common thing that happens in this county. We also have how the geology changes within the county which is important for oil and gas. It determines where they will drill and where they will be interested in and where they will not be. So we can use it for anything like that.
Alexandra: So it sounds like a super important resource that you are providing to just the county community for whoever needs it, for whatever purpose.
Erica: Right, right. And we are always umm… yeah we are always trying to umm improve our data and make it more accurate which over the years, technology improves and we get more and more accurate which becomes more and more helpful, especially for the emergency services part of it. We share our data for 9-1-1. We need to have the correct addresses, the correct points in case there are emergencies, so we are always trying to improve that.
Rebecca: That’s fascinating and Erica just for our listeners, you keep saying GIS. We keep saying GIS. What does that stand for?
Erica: It stands for Geographic Information Systems.
Rebecca: Wonderful. Thank you.
Erica: Yes.
Rebecca: Very fascinating. So, I also know you are I believe you are a recent graduate. So, as you were in college and you were preparing for a job, what career or college path or even classes did you take to prepare yourself for this line of work? If we have a listener that might be a high school student, a college student, a middle school student, a parent, what would your advice be? How would they get on this track?
Erica: Right. I majored in Ecology and minored in Environmental Science at Lycoming College, and I would say right now the most important class I took was my Intro. to GIS course. Just having that one course, just having a little bit of background helped me so much, and I am learning more as I continue to work here. But that was the most important course I took as part of my major. And then, as I’ve been working here for a couple of months, I realized that some other classes have definitely helped me. I took MicroEconomics which became very useful since we are involved in economic development in the county, so having a little bit of background makes it so much easier to understand how the economy works in this county. And then of course like my writing classes, speech classes, very important. I took Stats that has become very helpful. When using GIS, we have a lot of data to analyze. And then of course I took Environmental Bio. and that helped me understand a lot of the social and environmental impacts of decisions that are made. Especially, I can connect that back to decisions being made in the county right now. I’ll know the effects it could have. So a lot of classes have helped me out in my job so far.
Rebecca: Yeah that’s great. You are hitting on a lot of things: economics, the decision like the cause and effect, and you are mentioning a couple of things like the STEM skills so to speak. How do you use your STEM skills in your position every day?
Erica: Right. So, I need to understand the geology, hydrology of the land. I need to understand how that works and how that will affect the land. For example, if someone wants to do a land development project in a certain area of the county, we need to know if there are wetlands in the area, if the stream is around, where the floodplain is. We need to know what the effects will be if they build on that part of the land. I use ARCGIS, as I mentioned, every day which is constantly updating and changing, so you have to constantly keep learning. We use all the Microsoft programs every day, different databases and those are very important. It makes everything a lot easier if you know how to use them. We also use handheld GPS when we go out in the field. And that’s actually really helpful for us because when we are out there we will take points of the property lines, and then when we come back we can put those points onto our computer and they will make it easier to draw the property lines, rather than having to just look at the map and try to recreate it on the screen. We also have to a lot of times be able to read and interpret survey maps that come in to us. We have to make sure that the maps are correct, that the requirements are met, that maps correctly represent the property. And so for that we actually go out of the office, have a field day. We walk the property to make sure everything is correct. That’s another nice thing about this job, we aren’t always in the office every single day. We go out a couple times a month either to people’s properties or to different events or businesses. That’s always fun. And then another thing that I’m learning a lot about is grants funding that are very important for projects in the community which you don’t really get exposed to in high school, maybe a little bit in college but that’s something I’ve been learning as I’ve been going. And I’ve noticed that it’s very important for almost anything that we want to do here.
Rebecca: Especially I would imagine too in like the small communities, rural communities that a lot of us reside in, having that grant funding, seeking nontraditional funding sources are really important.
Erica: Yeah. And another thing that is really important to know how to use them to get the most projects completed that you can, or knowing where to find them because a lot of times that’s the biggest thing just like knowing that the funding is available and where to find them.
Alexandra: So Erica, fascinating. What you do every day is fascinating to me. And I imagine to many of our listeners because it’s one of those jobs that a lot of us might not have had occasion to learn about. So, the first thing is: I’m wondering if there is such a thing as your job in other counties? Is this the kind of position that has an option for every county in Pennsylvania? And if you know that answer, go ahead and answer.
Erica: Yeah, so I believe in other counties that are bigger, that the GIS Office is one office. The Economic Development office is an office, and the Planning office is an office. There would be three separate, I believe is what I’ve heard. But here, we have them all together just because it’s so small. So, if someone wanted to do just GIS, they could just be doing GIS. So that’s what I think other counties are like.
Alexandra: Fascinating. And so, talking about different skills that you do in your job, following up on a little bit. Many students sit in class, and the perennial complaint is: When are we going to use this? That they are learning in school. When am I ever going to use this? So, I want you to kind of help us put that to bed a little bit today and talk about how do you use STEM skills in your position?
Erica: Right so, I would say that one of the biggest things that we do is analyze data which I know can be not the most fun thinking to do in school. But, knowing how to do it makes your life a lot easier. Communication is a huge thing. Communicating with the public or your coworkers to be able to work together and accomplish goals is really important. Deadlines and time management is always something that is important in school, and it is also important here. I think networking is also really important, which maybe isn’t a big of a deal in high school but you start learning about it in college. At least here I know if we are connected with a lot of organizations and different offices, we can a lot of times connect people and help each other to accomplish things a lot easier. Teamwork of course is important. I think it is also important to be able to work on your own when needed. And then, we do do a lot of research here, mainly on going back to the 1980s, 1990s and looking at how properties were looking then, or changes that were made. We need to be able to find that information if something is happening now with that area. So we do that a lot as well.
Alexandra: So, I’m hearing lots of subjects that are taught in school in that response. I’m hearing ELA, I’m hearing math, science, social studies. And then I’m hearing you talk about some skills that kind of go across all those topics. They go across all those subjects. There are lots of skills that you use in your job.
Erica: Yep.
Rebecca: And I think, Lexie, we’ve asked in almost all of our episodes too, you know, did you have like an ah-ha moment where you were like: This is what I want to do? Many times in education, we talk to kids, and they feel pressure to know what they want to do right away. How did you come across this job? It’s not a very traditional job that I think people think about.
Erica: So, I had actually originally interviewed for a different job over the summer in Sullivan county. And, I did not get that job, And someone who was in my interview had contacted me and they let me know about this job opening, and they thought it might be a good fit and if I was willing to try it out. And I read the job description, and I did not know a lot about everything there, but I knew about GIS and some of the other things and I interviewed, and I got the job. And since I’ve been working here, I’ve been learning a lot. I’m realizing that a lot of people probably don’t know about this kind of job, and I kind of wished I maybe knew about it sooner and other people knew sooner. It’s definitely an option for someone in the STEM field.
Rebecca: Absolutely! That’s one of the reasons why we are doing this season of the podcast to get students, caregivers to know about all these other jobs out there that are related. And you bring up a lot of good points about interviewing. I think all of us can probably attest to maybe that we didn’t get the first job that we interviewed for. You’ve got to keep trying. And you bring up that networking piece. Again, you never know who is in that interview. And, putting yourself out there. You didn’t know everything in that job description, but you put yourself out there and you saw what happened. There are silver linings around everything.
Erica: I agree.
Rebecca: Before we, no we are going to move to this last question here. It is one of my favorites and our listeners know it. After all three seasons of this. So we are going to go for our BLaST 5 and in this season, except for one I believe Lexie, right? We tricked them with one. Instead of asking five random questions, we are just going to ask you in your industry, the job you are sitting in right now, what top 5 skills are needed to be successful?
Erica: So, the top 5 things that I think are needed in this job are to have a GIS background. Obviously, that is very important. I will kind of put in the Office Software background, knowing Microsoft Office…so putting all that together. All around good communication skills is very important. Adaptability and flexibility because a lot of times maybe I’m working on GIS, and all of the sudden, something else more important comes up in Economic Development, and you need to be able to switch gears and be able to come back to GIS later. Problem-solving I think is one of the most important things as well, and the last thing is being detail-oriented, and I’m kind of just referencing that with GIS and all the data. It needs to be all correct and the way it needs to be for everything to work correctly. So, those are the five most important things that I think are needed for this job.
Alexandra: I’m hearing you have to have a very sharp eye.
Erica: (laughs)
Alexandra: When it comes to looking at all those maps. You can’t miss those little details.
Erica: Right. The program will notice them, and then you have to figure out what might be wrong. It’s a little hard when it’s just one thing, one space, that’s incorrect.
Rebecca: I’m sure you have a ton of historic maps too and everything, all from history.
Erica: Yes. I umm the last couple weeks, I have actually been scanning-in maps from like the 1960s, 80s. Just so we have them on the computer, as well as paper copies. So, it is interesting to see how they made the maps back then compared to now, and the changes that have been made.
Rebecca: Well wonderful. This has been an absolute blast, no pun intended, Erica and Alexandra. We celebrate you, Erica and what you do everyday in STEM. Again, thank you for taking some time today to connect with us and our listeners. It was a pleasure having you on the podcast. Take care, and hopefully we’ll talk soon!
Erica: Sounds good. Thank you for having me!
Alexandra: Thank you, Erica!
We would like to thank you for blasting the airwaves with us today. If you like the show, please subscribe or leave a review. If you want to know more, check out www.iu17.org for further resources and show notes. If you’d like to learn more about NEPA STEM Ecosystem and the work we are doing in STEM and job pathways, please visit them at www.nepastem.org. As always, we want to thank you for what you do every single day. Remember, keep shining. We’ll be back next episode to provide you another educational solutions for all, as we continue to transform lives and communities through educational services.