PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
May 2014
391
KAREN CARTER
I N T E R V I E W
A graduate of California University of
Pennsylvania Ms. Carter joined a firm in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a Geospatial
Technician. A native of the Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania/Atlantic City, New Jersey area
Ms. Carter lived in many different latitudes and
longitudes, picked up a few languages, and met
lots of great people. Ms. Carter became President
of the Eastern Great Lakes Region in 2014 after
serving as Membership-Chair, 2012, and Vice-
President, 2013.
I appreciate you!
Karen, the above excerpt was taken from a letter you
wrote to your board members earlier this year. Why has
being part of the EGL Region been so important to you?
Being an active EGL Region member has given me the
opportunity to soar.
I am an encourager by nature and being a member of
Eastern Great Lakes Region has allowed me to pour my
passion, energy and enthusiasm into a positive vehicle for
education and change.
What drew you to a career in the geospatial industry?
I love people and cultures and had taken an enormous
amount of Anthropology courses with the thinking
“an Anthropology degree was just a formality”, until
I transferred into a university that no longer offered
Anthropology degrees. I lost it in the Dean’s office, hot
tears rolled down my face, I had just lost my mother a few
months before and now I was losing my lifelong dream.
I was inconsolable. The Dean left the room promising to
return with a solution to my problem. He came back in the
room and said “what about Geography?” My degree is in
Geography with a concentration in GIS and Emergency
Management.
Is there one bit of advice you wished someone would
have shared with you when you first started your geo-
spatial career?
Mentors! I knew about mentors and the mentorship pro-
gram from school but after I started working in the field
I really needed someone with real world work experience
to advise and guide me. Thanks to ASPRS and the EGL
members I now have endless resources available to me.
You are never too old to learn, and never too old to be
guided along the right path.
How has being a member of the EGL impacted your
work and influenced your career?
Being a member has opened my thinking about my career
choice. I now have a limitless picture of the geospatial
field due to my affiliation with EGLR and ASPRS. I am
now able to dream and visualize what I can achieve in my
career on an audacious scale with no limits, being able to
see opportunities and see a brighter future.
What was the coolest thing you’ve done thus far in your
career?
Osmosis! OMG, osmosis does work.
I was at my first EGLR technical meeting listening to
a presenter explain the calculus formula that he used
in his paper. I realized, not only did I not understand
why he used what he used but I didn’t agree with the
meaning he gave. Not understanding was not unusual,
I am very bad at math. Here I was, quietly disagreeing
with this presenter who may have had calculus 5 for all I
knew, when the gentleman sitting next to me pointed out
the inconsistence of the same problem I disagreed with.
This gentleman had the look of a math professor, or so I
thought. I was absolutely floored; then and there I knew
without a doubt that by sitting next to this genius, some
of his math knowledge had jumped over to me. WOW!!!!!!
OMG. Cool uh? I knew it was only because I was sitting
next to the math genius when I couldn’t find my way back
to the meeting room from the ladies room.
If you could meet anyone in the geospatial field, dead
or alive, who would it be? What would you discuss?
There are so many great people in the geospatial field that
I would love to sit down and talk to, far too many to list.
But I have the good fortune of having pioneers, legends
