GIS at Stanford

I had an interview for a transportation planning position with technical expertise in GIS at Stanford.  I opened up Google Hangouts and received a call from a guy there named Ramses.  We talked about the Hangouts a bit and then he told me that this was the first of several interview rounds and I was one of ten being interviewed.  He said that he had a bunch of questions that he would go through that that this would provide a guide for his evaluation.  I asked about the job and we talked about the UCLA Professor Don Shoup a bit with whom Ramses said that he had consulted.

He said that the job is a data focused job and wanted to evaluate my skills.  The first questions were about Data Management, table production and visualization.  I went over my experience with SQL here.  I recounted my experience with Cartography and ESRI’s GIS and then my experience with MS Access.  I discussed how easy it is to learn the tools if you understand these things.  Ramses described the products his office uses: “R” plug-ins and data mining tools.

He asked about my experience with Java and Python—scripting, programming and command line.  I explained that I had taken classes and built things on my own webpage.  He then asked if I would be able to edit xml or if I had had experience with a debugger or a command line.  To this I explained that I was competent.  I gave him some examples of my modeling experience and I indicated that solving some of his problems might involve several iterations of scripting and a lot of time for the processing and development.  I made it clear that I was a capable GIS analyst with cartographic and network analysis skills pertaining to route optimization, scripting and online tools.

He then asked about my survey experiences.  Here I went into depth with examples I knew: my thesis and helping with the parking office at my university.  He explained that every year his office collects a representative survey from a population of 60000 campus users.  He said the successful candidate would be instrumental in the process of moving data from the survey to analysis.  I explained that my project management experience began with my experiences at Grad School and continued through to the last two jobs I had had.  He then asked me to explain to him why I should get the job and I said that this is the position that I wanted (my “dream job”) and that he had essentially gone over a long list of things that I was well qualified to do.

I asked about the environment in the office and turnover.  He indicated that there wasn’t a huge emphasis on punctuality and that working from home was occasionally possible.  He also said that there wasn’t a lot of turnover in the job and that a lot of people are around for years before they even consider moving on to something better.  He was taking over from his boss who was moving to the Airport.  When we wrapped things up Ramses mentioned that the next round of interviews would be in Stanford proper.