Geospatial Information Science Minor
Geospatial Information Science offers students a powerful way to ask questions about the world: how people, places, and systems interact, and how those relationships shape the issues we care about most.
That spirit of inquiry is at the heart of a liberal arts education, and GIScience adds tools that help students explore those questions with clarity and depth. The field itself is now well established, supported by decades of scholarship, national standards, and a strong research community.
This five-course minor introduces students to the core concepts and analytical methods of GIScience and gives them room to apply those skills within their chosen fields of study. Housed in Mathematics & Computer Science, the program reflects the field’s growing emphasis on computation and modeling while offering students an inviting, accessible path into spatial thinking.
Why GIS?
Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T) is a multidisciplinary field focused on the theories, methodologies, and tools for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing spatial data. It has applications in environmental science, urban planning, disaster management, public health, agriculture, transportation, real estate, utilities, telecommunications, sociology, archaeology, and geography. GIS helps students turn questions into decisions—using mapping, spatial analysis, and data science to understand how people, environments, and systems interact. Students majoring in a wide range of disciplines will find GIS helpful for their studies at Washington College and for their career prospects after graduation. Majors that should consider GIS include (but are not limited to):
- Environmental studies
- Biology
- Business
- Political science
- Anthropology/archaeology
- Economics
- Psychology
- Computer science
Students working on the minor at Washington will find they can apply what they learn while still enrolled through hands-on projects or internships via the Geospatial Innovation Program.
Professionals in academia, business, and government use GIS&T to manage and analyze extensive spatial datasets, enabling real-time navigation, optimizing routing, facilitating safe navigation for self-driving cars, tracking wildlife migration, constructing 3D urban models, and providing insights for anthropological studies and traffic safety.