Elizabeth Proctor was my instructor in Geography 110, Introduction to GIS, in Fall 2006. She was a good instructor in all respects. She works as a GIS professional, and her enthusiasm for the subject was apparent. I contacted her fairly often via e-mail about our assignments, and she always responded quickly. She offers students opportunities to earn extra credit on both exams and projects. She also drew our attention to a Bay Area GIS professional association and its programs and had some advice about seeking jobs in the GIS field.

With regard to the class itself, I found Geography 110 to be more of a class about using software than about geography. The class provides instruction on the use of the ArcGIS software produced by ESRI. Elizabeth typically spent the first 45 minutes or hour of class lecturing on a cartographic or GIS topic. After that, we were free to use the computers in the classroom to work on our GIS assignments. We had four of these during the semester. When I took the class, the computers in the GIS classroom were very slow. The ESRI program was also installed on the computer in the CAD classroom, which was open for our use at certain times during the week. I understand that the GIS classroom was going to get new computers, so slow computers may no longer be an issue.

I found the class fairly difficult because of the assignments using the software. Quite a few of my classmates, though, seemed to find it pretty easy. I imagine that people with a background using complicated software packages would not encounter too much difficulty using the ESRI software.