Congratulations to 2021 URISA Texas Scholarship winner Daniel Miranda!

2021 URISA Texas Scholarships Awarded

URISA is an organization that provides a community-based resource for the Texas GIS community.  They offer scholarships to existing students and recently awarded first place to ACC GIS student Daniel Miranda.  Read more about scholarship winners and view their winning maps here.

From the URISA website: 

Daniel Miranda is currently enrolled in a GIS certificate program at Austin Community College (ACC) and hopes to use it to pivot to a career in the GIS profession. He is looking to transition to a role where he can combine his passion for conservation, the environment, and outdoor recreation with my experience in database configuration and my scientific education background.

Daniel has always been a lover of the outdoors and spending time running, hiking, backpacking, cycling, and rock climbing. He also takes part in conservation work, through volunteering with the city of Austin’s Wildlands Conservation Division to help maintain juniper forest habitat for the endangered golden-cheeked warbler on the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve and to maintain water quality on the Water Quality Protection Lands. While exploring opportunities, GIS came up frequently. Daniel soon realized that GIS could provide a path to pursue options that better match my interests and values.

Previously, Daniel earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biology and his background includes 12 years in the pharmaceutical and medical device industry. He has extensive experience in research and development, manufacturing, equipment validation, facilities maintenance, and configuration and implementation of enterprise quality management system software built on the Salesforce platform. That software experience gave Daniel a lot of time working with relational databases, which has helped in his current introductory GIS courses. He is looking forward to combining his previous experience with databases, his interest in the outdoors, and his course work at ACC in making this career pivot.

We interviewed ACC GIS student Daniel Miranda to learn more about his application experience:

What encouraged you to apply for the scholarship?

A chance to win scholarship money to help offset tuition was certainly part of it. I was also excited to try and apply some of the skills I learned early in my studies at ACC. Finally, having outside people look at my work was a way to start getting my name out there.

How was your application experience?

My application experience was relatively straightforward. URISA had very clear requirements, namely an 11x17 map and a short essay, and I was notified well in advance of the deadline via the GIS Blog. Although I was only a couple weeks into my Intro to GIS and Intro to Geospatial Data courses, I felt that I had learned enough tools from the classes to take a shot at applying.

Overall, it took me about 24 hours of work to complete my application, which included collecting some field data, so roughly two to three times longer than the project work we do as part of our ACC classes. I had to muddle through field data collection and clipping features since we had not reached that part of the semester, but it worked out!

Picking a topic that really interested me, land conservation/management practices, made the essay relatively easy to write. I was able to clearly and convincingly articulate why I made the map, how I picked the design features, and why it was important.

What words of encouragement would you give your fellow ACC classmates?

It was fun to come up with a topic I cared about, put my newly learned skills to use, and share something interesting with other people. A chance at some scholarship money certainly does not hurt either.

If you can set aside the time, these applications are a good way to apply the skills we are learning through ACC, regardless of the final scholarship outcome.

Lastly, do not be discouraged from applying to these opportunities if you are new to GIS. I had never heard of GIS or ArcGIS Pro until recently and the only experience I had was gained from the first half of my first semester in the ACC program.