Gerard said that, because the course and the accompanying scholarships emerged late in 1999, many potential students were not aware of them. The police see good career prospects for people with GIS skills. They are offering our students work experience. Investigative work using GIS can be quite intriguing. For example, it can establish crime patterns.
Spatial information has widely different applications.
Last year Gerard and Bob Poliness, another teacher at the centre, took the students of the old associate diploma course to do work experience in Griffith, New South Wales, to find ways to reduce evaporation from irrigation streams. Students also worked with Gippsland Water, which is developing a sewerage flood plan, based on the students' valuable work of locating old sewerage pits. The focus of the new curriculum is even more practical, and Gippsland Water has again offered work experience to the RMIT students in 2000. Both teachers in the course are professional surveyors. Bob Poliness, president of the Institute of Engineering and Mining Surveyors, says that being just out of the industry, he and Gerard take a long-range view.