dissertation

I had the final exam for my MSc on Tuesday, on the topic of GIS Management. It is strange to think that that was the last exam I will ever take as part of a formal education, one that has lasted 18 years of my life. Exams have never been a strong point of mine - instead prefering the use of coursework and other methods of examination - but they don't appear to have gone too badly.

Although the taught part of the course is now over completely, I still have the dissertation to do over the coming months. The title of the dissertation will be "Spatial analysis and representation of usage patterns for a web-based store finder system".

The first task I need to perform is to present my project proposal to the staff and other students in the department next Thursday. In order to do this I will need to start reading around the topic a little more to see what work has been undertaken already and try to structure my ideas for my own project. To help me organise the articles I will be reading over the course of the work I am trying out the Backpack online organiser which allows me to keep an online personal space to store all sorts of information. My first forays into the world of Backpack can be seen publicly on my MSc Dissertation References page. I may stop updating it as I'm only experimenting with the service at the moment but it is proving to be useful so far so the likelihood is I will continue with it over the summer.

Well, having started my MSc in Geographic Information Science at UCL back in September of last year, it's now starting to come to an end - or at least the teaching part of it is. This evening I have handed in my last piece of coursework, and next week my final exams begin. This semester I'm taking three modules that have exams and each of them is three hours long. They're basically placed a week apart, leaving a nice period in between for revision unlike in previous years in Manchester where I've had a day in between if I'm lucky.

Following the exams I'll be working full-time on my dissertation for the summer. June to September seems like a long time until I start thinking about exactly how much work I will have to do over the summer. Luckily it's work I'll enjoy doing so there are no real issues. Still, I'm sure the summer will go very quickly, hopefully involving lots of time spent in Regents Park and on Hampstead Heath, both of which are really close to where I'm living. If there are any wi-fi hotspots around there, I can even work while I'm there!

For my dissertation I'm lucky enough to be working with a company I've been fascinated by since the early days of the internet. Earlier in the term a GIS developer (who is also a UCL alumni) came in to give a presentation on the company he worked for, Multimap. With this being just at the sort of time when we should have been thinking about a dissertation to take on for the summer months, two things clicked in my head and I thought I'd get in touch with them to see if they had anything I could help them out with as part of my dissertation. I was very hopeful as they were basically doing exactly what I wanted to do - geographic information for the web. My whole course of education has been based on the fact that I'm interested in geography and computing and especially the areas in which they combine. That desire explains my choice of topics at A-level, BSc level and now MSc level. (If only there was some way of combining photography with them as well!)

I was really happy when Multimap got back to me and asked me to come in and meet them over lunch to talk about the possibilities. So now I have a dissertation topic to work on after the exams, in an area that fascinates me and with a great company. What more could I ask for? After I've researched the area in more detail, I'm hoping to create some geographic analysis software to help them out with some of the work they do. I can't really go into it yet, but hopefully will be able to in the future. I've been discussing non-disclosure agreements with them and my course tutor over the past few days and frankly it's fascinating - if a little scary at the same time. Whilst being aware of them, I've never had to deal with NDAs before at all.

The website I created as the final year project for my first degree (BSc Computing and Geography with Industrial Experience) up in Manchester was designed as a project on its own - not being worked on with any organisations - so there were very few restrictions as to what I could do. Originally I would have had more input from other organisations but sadly that plan never worked out, so it was a complete standalone project in the end. I still managed to achieve a comfortable 1st class mark for the project though, which I was extremely pleased with.

So, next thing on my agenda is to make sure I'm prepared for the first of my final exams on Tuesday...