It’s been three years since we last gathered at Salisbury University for our summer quarterly meeting. Following our July 2019 summer quarterly meeting, we gathered at Specific Gravity, a local beer and pizza place. Our server was a lively young woman entering her senior year at Salisbury University. She had recently completed Dr. Lembo’s spatial statistics class and wasn’t certain that a career in GIS was right for her. Being strong advocates of GIS, we told her to stick with it and to consider joining MSGIC.
Fast forward to July 2022 and MSGIC’s first in-person meeting in over two years. We returned to Salisbury University for the summer quarterly. While attendees were networking during the continental breakfast, Kyla Cupp introduced herself to me. Kyla works for the City of Salisbury and would be giving our first presentation. She looked very familiar, and I asked if we had met before. She rattled off a couple of conferences that she had recently attended, but that wasn’t it. And then she said something about having worked as a server while in college and maybe that was how I knew her. From there, I was able to put together that she was the same person who had served us at the MSGIC happy hour in 2019. Kyla is now in her third year of working in the GIS industry and is a MSGIC member. She gave a fun and informative presentation on the great work she and the rest of the City of Salisbury team has been doing. Kyla also brought the city’s drone to the meeting. During one of the network breaks, we all headed outside for a group picture.
Thank you to Kyla and all the presenters at the 2022 MSGIC Summer Quarterly Meeting:
- Dr. Michael Scott, Salisbury University
- Mark Burt, Anne Arundel County Office of Planning and Zoning
- Julia Fischer, Maryland Department of Information Technology
- David McSpaden, DME Consulting
- Tony Spicci, GIS Certification Institute
- Erin Silva, ESRGC
Thank you to ESRGC for hosting us, and to the attendees for showing up and making our return to in-person meetings a great success. Although I don’t think we recruited any of the Specific Gravity staff to join MSGIC this year, we had fun at the happy hour meeting new people and catching up with old friends.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at the TUgis Conference where we will be doing more networking. If you happen to run into Kyla or anyone else who is new to our community at TUgis or another event, please introduce yourself and give them a warm welcome to the Maryland GIS community.
