The second of the three panels brought back three recent graduates for a focus on their required-for-graduation internships that they completed in the summer of 2003. Internship Coordinator for Geography, Professor Mike Sublett, moderated. His thee panelists, all B.S. in Geography in 2003, were Laura Vahling, a Planning Analyst for the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission; Lara Mormino, a City Inspector in Community Development for the City of Wood River, Illinois; and Lisa Schmidt, who works out West on environmental research and education projects. Schmidt represented the Student Conservation Association, the not-for-profit corporation that helped her find an internship at North Cascades National Park in Washington. Mormino interned in the same office as she now works, while Vahling interned in Champaign for the Institute for Technology Development, a company that monitors remote sensing imagery for agriculturally relevant information.

Scott Buschbacher, an Executive Officer of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, along with several other Geography graduates and one non-Illinois State geographer, lead panel discussions where the overall theme to students was to find a career that really suits you, stick with it, and watch time fly past. Buschbacher’s panel was moderated by retiring Professor of Geography Jim Carter and included panelists Jeff Panfil (B.S. 1997), who works in Bloomington for Towers Perrin making paper and electronic maps for the insurance industry, and Don Larson, a product and hiring manager for Mapping Specialists in Madison, Wisconsin, a firm that does a lot of quality paper maps for Rand McNally, National Geographic, and textbook publishers, as well as its own line of three-dimensional maps of Wisconsin lakes.

Photos courtesy of Professor of Geography-Geology Jim Carter.