Moustafa Mohamed
Year of graduation: 2012
Major: Geographic Information Systems
Current employment status:
- Employer: Leidos Inc
- Position: GIS Analyst
Did you/do you currently go to graduate school? No
Why did you want to be a GEOG/GIS/ENSP major?
I was lucky enough to travel the world and experience many different cultures and visit exotic places. My father loved to travel and took us on many trips during our summer vacations so I grew up with a very diverse view of the world. When I started attending UMD my interests were in the humanities, such as history, political science and anthropology, but I wanted a technical degree. GIS was the perfect choice in this regard because it was the best mix of both worlds. You can’t be an effective GIS analyst without taking human geography into account and in that regard, I was very fortunate to have experienced different cultures and visited other countries.
What internships or independent research did you do as a GEOG/GIS/ENSP major?
I interned with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). I was tasked with the GIS portion of the TCOTRN project. The nature of this assignment was to map potential drug and weapon road routes to the United States from Central America. Opensource GIS data was used in this project as well as NGA Geonames. The web of roads then became a network which we analyzed using the Network Analyst tool. I was tasked with this work for 6 months and it was very relevant to the work I did starting with Leidos.
