I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Geography (GIS) and Urban Studies in May 2023 and with a Master of Urban Planning in May 2025. I also worked for the Campus Activities Board, so I was around UWM a lot.
I always loved to travel and growing up, I spent most summer days at state parks along Lake Michigan. Geography excited me throughout grade school because it allowed me to understand and be even more inspired by what I was seeing out in nature. I also had several maps hung up in my bedroom as a kid, so I spent hours looking at maps and that likely ingrained the appreciation for maps and geography even early on.
Currently, I am a transportation planner for the Duluth-Superior urban area. The ‘Twin Ports’ as we call them, is an incredibly dynamic area for working in geography. Duluth has massive hills close to the Lake Superior coast which shaped how it has developed and currently shapes how we develop bike, pedestrian, and transit projects. In my role, I serve as the lead coordinator for these modes at our organization. There are limitations with where we can place sidewalks and trails and still have them be ADA accessible because of how steep certain areas of Duluth are. Related to this, one geography related element of Duluth that always interests me is that the city serves as a hub for training and education for people with visual impairments and blindness, because the hills are generally all to the west. This provides a tactile wayfinding tool for people who are learning how to navigate cities while having limited vision. Using geography, we also work to understand which communities have transportation barriers and have higher need for active transportation access. We develop our metropolitan bicycle and pedestrian plans to encourage our cities to target bike lane and sidewalk investments in lower income and lower vehicle ownership neighborhoods.
Niko Papakis was really important to me as an instructor and provided me with great advice. He used to stick around after class to talk about my interests and helped me know what to expect in grad school as I was applying for it. My favorite UWM Geography memories are of the study group that formed for my capstone class. We had a good-sized group that provided good feedback for final presentations, gave ideas for our research projects, and gave each other a lot of confidence when writing the final report. After the school year was over, a lot of that same group stuck around Milwaukee for the next couple of summers. I had a great time playing beach volleyball, going to Brewers games, and just seeing classmates around at different events.
Continue to do fun things with geography, there are a lot of skills and knowledge that you develop that are relevant for activities outside of school. Finding unique vacation ideas is one of the best ways to apply your geography skills. My capstone project was about shipwrecks and lighthouses and it ended up inspiring a trip that my girlfriend (now wife) took, doing a road trip around Lake Michigan and the UP to visit maritime museums and lighthouses. I had fun looking into the histories of all the small towns that we visited and seeing the different development patterns and building styles.