Daniel Sweeney: Earning a Fourth Degree!
I’m Daniel Sweeney. I’m an adult learner now (I think that’s what we call it), getting a Bachelors’ in Geography on the GIS Track. I have a college degree in Languages and Literature, and a Masters’ degree in Library Science, and another Masters’ degree in Computer Science, and have studied some Math and Statistics in between the other things. Originally, I was going to get a certificate, or just study GIS a little bit, but things kind of snowballed, and I wound up coming back to get a full Bachelors degree. 
It has been two years since I started studying in the Geography department, in the very end of the Covid pandemic. I did some work on spatial databases years ago, and have always been interested in GIS. Originally, I was thinking about a certificate but things sort of snowballed. The first class I took was Environment-Society Geography with Phurwa Dhondup Gurung, over the three-week May term. That was really eye-opening–it was three hours a day of a lot of things that I had thought about a lot in the past but needed a new framework to reason about. Population Geography with Fernando Riosmena in the fall also remixed a lot of things that I thought I knew into a new shape. 
A lot of my education is pretty technical, because I was a computer nerd, and I studied Languages and Literature way back when. I knew I had some gaps in the social sciences. I’m glad that ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Geography helped me fill in some of those gaps while I also studied how to make maps and analyze spatial data. A lot of my TAs were physical geographers. Being able to work with them as I studied gave me another perspective on space and scale. You can tell from how I have written this that the interdisciplinary nature of geography has been really valuable for me. 
Since I was a transfer who already had a college degree, a lot of my general requirements were satisfied. So, a large proportion of my coursework has been in Geography in the last two years (I did not look up the exact proportions, which usually I make people do when they engage in the rhetoric of data analysis). I think normally if you took a lot of classes in a single department, you would expect to have a lopsided education, but I feel like my relatively brief return to higher education in middle age has been very well-rounded for me. 
