Jason Thompson (BS Enivronmental Geology, 2008)

For the past six years, I've worked for the Swinomish Tribe's environmental program, doing field work related to hydrology, hydrogeology, restoration, and a wide variety of other tasks. Sometimes I'm out on a boat or on a beach watching the bald eagles fly around. Not bad!

I'm now leading and coordinating most of our department's data collection activities with a few technicians under me. I have made it my mission to modernize our data collection methods away from paper in the field and hand-entered values on spreadsheets. Today we are all digital with mobile mapping apps, mobile forms, and databases with plenty of interconnected functions, greatly increasing our capacity to collect and manage useful environmental data.

This has lead to an interest in data generally, and last year was accepted into CWU's IT and Admin. Management M.S. program with a data analysis specialization. I'll be done in August 2018 and looking to transition into a career in data analysis and data science!