Eyes on Earth Episode 99 – EROS 50th: Interns Who Stayed

Audio file

EoE99_Interns-Who-Stayed.mp3.mp3

Transcript

Jesslyn Brown

You know both the science side of it, the fascinating science that that is done here, the variety of topics that were being done as well as working with really smart people.

Kristi Sayler

It was just great to work with all these people, different people that, you know, from so many different backgrounds, and being a, you know, a math major with a computer science minor. And then I got into the geography and remote sensing aspect of how to apply that. And after I looked at a couple of Landsat images, I was hooked.

Susan Embrock

Coming to EROS, you learn about a lot of science and remote sensing and research that you just didn't know that you'd be interested in.

Roger Auch

A lot of things get lost over into kind of generalities of things and the world is much more complex and dynamic, and dynamic than that. And so we need people who can, can think beyond 30-second sound bite.

Sheri Levisay

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth, a podcast produced at the USGS EROS Center, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Our podcast focuses on our ever-changing planet and on the people here at EROS and across the globe who use remote sensing to monitor and study the health of Earth. My name is Sheri Levisay, your host for this episode. Throughout the center's 50-year history, EROS internships have attracted talented young people to learn about various aspects of the remote sensing and science mission at EROS. A good number of them chose to make their careers at EROS, sometimes for several decades. Today we're talking to several of these folks who chose to stay, some in person and some joining us remotely. They'll introduce themselves as we go and share their favorite memories at EROS. Everyone, welcome to eyes on Earth. Jess, let's start with you. I hear maybe you're the one with the most seniority in the room. Tell us your name, a little bit about yourself and how you ended up as an EROS intern.

Jesslyn Brown

Yeah, it's always interesting to be referred to as the senior person in the room. Mixed feelings. My name is Jesslyn Brown; I go by Jess. I started as an intern at EROS in 1989. I heard about EROS, I think for the first time from my graduate advisor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, whose name is Don Lundquist. I was working on a degree in geography and I had just, actually, I’d just came back from the AAG meeting Association of American Geographers, my first conference as a geographer. And Dr. Lundquist said to me, you need to call Kevin Gallo, he's, he works at EROS. I really didn't actually know what EROS was at that point. I made the call. He had an internship opportunity. Dr. Gallo was a, actually an employee of NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], but he was stationed at EROS, and you know, long story long, he interviewed me. And then I was given the internship to work with Kevin. It was really an amazing place to work. I remember just really being impressed with the mission, and of course, back then we read Landsat said data off of reel-to-reel tapes. That was a real challenge. And I remember being really impressed with the poster on the wall on Chernobyl. So the Chernobyl accident had happened, I guess, three years before that in 1986. And of course, everybody knew about that. That was a really big environmental disaster. Very scary time period. And here's this poster with Landsat data on it. I think it was sort of a time series, you know, before and after. And you could see the thermal signal of that, that disaster in that poster, and I just thought, I mean, I'm a science geek, so I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. It was great working with all of the staff. Dr. Gallo was really fun to work with as well. I did a lot of graphics work at that point. We did not have a separate communications and outreach part of the building, part of EROS. So a lot of my work was making graphics, you know, to be presented or to be put on the wall or to be put into publications, but our graphics capabilities were very crude compared to today. There were other interns at the same time, so we had a cadre of interns, and they stuck us in a room together with our little monitors because there were no PCs, either. This makes me feel old. And so you're on these really tiny monitors with like black background and green text, and you cannot see graphics on your monitor. We had to go sign up to a special at a special place called the Digital Analysis Lab, the DAL. And that's where we actually looked at our results. So you would do all this programming and calculations with remote sensing data, and then you had to make an appointment and on, you know, sign your name that you wanted to use the DAL from 1:00 to 2:00 and look at your results. It sounds kind of prehistoric compared to now, but that's what it was like in ’89.

Sheri Levisay

What's your favorite memory being an intern?

Jesslyn Brown

Like I said, the camaraderie, the, you know, both the science side of it, the fascinating science that that is done here, the variety of topics that were being done as well as working with really smart people.

Sheri Levisay

And what made you stay?

Jesslyn Brown

At the same time, I was approached by Dr. Jim Merchant, who is a, who was—he's passed away unfortunately—but he was also a professor at University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and he was working on a, he was just starting out on a project with Tom Loveland, Dr. Tom Loveland, who was here at EROS. And I knew Tom a little bit, not really well; between the two of them, somebody asked me if I would work on this project. So my next job after working for, ah, EROS as an intern was to become a, they gave me a title, visiting scientist, which sounded very important, and I worked for the next two years for University of Nebraska, Lincoln, on this project, but I was stationed at EROS, and then that turned into a contract job in 1993, and then I worked for three different federal contractors between 1993 and 2008. And then in 2008, I received a, I applied for and got a USGS job. So it's a long answer for a long career. What made me stay? The work and the people. I mean, both of those things are wonderful. And you know the mission here, it's very important. Understanding and changing Earth.

Sheri Levisay

So what's your position now?

Jesslyn Brown

So I lead the project that's been called LCMAP, Land Chance Monitoring, Assessment and  Projection. I've been in that leadership role since 2017. I call myself an acting project manager because my degree is in geography. It's not in project management. But many of us over in science and EROS wear several hats. So that's what I do right now, and it's been a really challenging job. It keeps me busy and hope to be here for a bit longer.

Sheri Levisay

OK. Kristi, you go next.

Kristi Sayler

All right. Hi, I'm Kristi Sayler. I started as an intern in May of ’91. I was a, let's see, I would have been finishing my sophomore year at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and they had a great career planning office there. And I happened to see this internship listed. I contacted the person that was listed on there, and then I was hired in the science department, as what was called at the time a co-op student with the government. And those internships were a little different than what they have now, whereas now they're not guaranteed placement, at that time, they had the opportunity to offer me a position when I finished the internship. I guess I kind of had forgotten about the fact that when I was a senior in high school, they had a job shadow program at my high school and I actually came to EROS as one of my job shadows because I was interested in computers and programming and computer science; that's what I started out with at School of Mines, and then I switched to a math major before I got this job. But so I had all the computer skills. So when I started I was still doing a lot of programming and stuff. I was actually working where the global land cover project when I started doing programming, which is something that Jess has had work, been working on at that time as well. So I did work that first summer, went back to school in the fall and then a part of the co-op was also working a semester, so then I came back in the spring and worked from January to the end of the summer again. And then I went back and finished school and came back in the next summer. So it was a little bit different of a kind of internship than most people have because of that government co-op program at the time.

Sheri Levisay

Your favorite memory being an intern.

Kristi Sayler

I think kind of like what Jess said, there was just so many of us at the same time. Susan started at the same time I did. We had a big group of interns, you know, and we'd always have, you know, be able to have lunch together, be able to talk through things, you know, do things on the off time so that you actually knew somebody when you were coming here, you know, not having lived here before. Even though I am originally from South Dakota, a small town called Menno just southeast of here, so Sioux Falls was a big city to me, but still, it's not like I knew anybody when I, when I came to work here. So that was always great that we had a camaraderie, you know, amongst us all.

Sheri Levisay

So you already indicated that part of your, the structure of your internship was that you would have a job when you were done. But what made you stay long term here at EROS?

Kristi Sayler

The science, I really like the science branch. At the time, June Thormodsgard was our branch chief, and she had basically was the one that offered me the permanent position to stay. I had gotten involved in a lot of different projects, and John Dwyer, also, who's not with us, was someone, I was actually basically his intern, like my second or third summer, working on helping him with his imagery for his master’s thesis that he was working on so. So it would, you know, it was just great to work with all these people, different people that, you know, from so many different backgrounds and being a, you know, a math major with a computer science minor, and then I got into the geography and remote sensing aspect of how to apply that, and after I looked at a couple of Landsat images, I was hooked. And so there was no going back from that. So even when I went back to school, you know, to finish my degree, I took a remote sensing class and, you know, found a work study position and one of the GIS labs there, and you know, everything just, you know, fell together then, and there was no question that I was going to stay. And I wanted to keep living in South Dakota, pretty much. I don't know why at that time. [Laughter.] But I was naive at that time. [Laughing] No.

Susan Embrock

Kristi …

Kristi Sayler

Yeah, it was you, Susan!

Sheri Levisay

So what's your position now?

Kristi Sayler

Now, I did real science for a long time, and then recently, back in 2016, which is not too far in the past, I took a position in the science branch as a science as a supervisor, so now I'm more into the management side of things. And then during COVID they needed someone to be a program manager for this project called LSRD, which is LSDS [Land Satellites Data System] Science Research and Development project. And they basically said, can you do this? And I said, well, I'll try. And so there I am, and now I'm pretty much the full time PM for the LSRD project, as well as sticking my fingers into, all other science things, as Jess knows, that I help with have helped with LCMAP in the past, and now we're starting a new project that I'm going to be a project manager on that project as well, all in the vein of, you know, land change and science.

Sheri Levisay

Now we'll talk to Susan online. Susan, go ahead and tell us, share with us, how did you end up as an EROS intern, and when was that?

Susan Embrock

Hi! Yep, as you said, I'm Susan Embrock. I started when I was at Brookings, SDSU [South Dakota State University], I had gotten into some work digitizing Africa, the Horn of Africa, mainly at a cooperator with EROS that was stationed on campus. And since, just like Kristi, I was a math-computer major, and a coworker of mine, a classmate of mine, also is a math and computer major, and we both applied at EROS because we had seen after I had worked on campus with the cooperator that was with EROS because I had really, honestly not heard of EROS when I was at Brookings, and we both decided to apply, and since we both took every class together and we both had had C, the Famine Early Warning System project out at EROS, FEWS is what it's called, was looking for a couple of interns that had C programming, so we got on board. And so it was great, because I think there was five of us that commuted down from SDSU all summer long, and then we all arranged our schedules for the next two years to have Tuesdays and Thursdays off. So we came and worked at EROS every Tuesday and Thursday, so we worked in the summer. We worked in  the school year, we worked, but we had that carpool of people, which was great. Because it's an hour, and you don't telecommute back then. So I think one of the few tasks that we started when we started as an intern, which really will date me, is that Windows just came out. And they wanted us to learn how to use it, so, and so that's how I started there as a C programmer. And then, as I've been at EROS, I've worn many hats. I should state that after I was done being an intern, they didn't have a full-time job for me at the time. So I did briefly go away for nine months, and then Michelle Anthony, who also was an intern with us at the same time as Kristi and I, reached out to me and said they finally had a full time job for me. So at the time, there was an opening and it had to do a lot with the digitizing as well. I was working with satellite images, and it was the year of the flood of ’93, and so we were working a lot of overtime back then. You would digitize every river, rock, tree—with flooding nowadays that's all automatic, but that's how I kind of got into that one. And then I moved into being more of a programmer; now I'm kind of the web developer of several different projects, and just kind of learned on the job what the tasks they wanted, having a degree in computers and math, you know, kind of versatile to just go with the flow on what they ask of the work, so.

Sheri Levisay

What's your favorite memory of being an intern?

Susan Embrock

It will piggyback off of what Jess and Kristi said; when we started as interns, we had a half a dozen, dozen interns. We would take up a whole table, and we would all meet for lunch and compare which projects you guys were working on. And it was so interesting. All the different signs that we everybody was learning about and learning so many different things. Like Kristi mentioned, she went back to take a remote sensing class because, you know, coming to EROS, you learn about a lot of science and remote sensing and research that you just didn't know that you'd be interested in. And so that was really great. But my favorite memory, which kind of comes back to this is the Midwest and everybody's down to earth. I was a golfer, and there was a golf league at the time, and a couple people found out and asked if I could fill in once in a while as a substitute, and I didn't really know anybody—as you, as an intern, you really don't know who people are. And got asked to golf with a few people, and after I golfed with them and really wondered what I had said afterwards, I was golfing with one of the top people at EROS and had no. Yeah, but it was fun, because it was just so down to earth, you would have never known that they were the high management and you were an intern. And it's just the, the down to earth people that are out at EROS. Everybody wants to learn from everybody because it's such a great mission and learn from everybody else that's out there because everybody has something to give.

Sheri Levisay

What made you stay at EROS for your career?

Susan Embrock

Well, the work was really interesting because it wasn't really—I mean, I initially wanted to become an actuary actually. And but I got this computer job, and I was liking it and several of the people that I was interns with stayed at EROS, so it was nice to have people that I knew and continue working with. And but just the the change of job pace for me the whole time I’ve been at EROS, I, like, continually switch hats. So it's not like you're gonna go to a bank and you're gonna do the same job for the next 30 years. We, I have done multiple, multiple different jobs and projects.

Sheri Levisay

What is your position now overall?

Susan Embrock

My title is a computer engineer, but I would consider myself a web developer, web application developer working within the programming side of the—I do not work with the science and research like Kristi and Jess. I'm more on the computer side of the building aspect of behind the scenes. They do their research with the data that we manipulate and get to them.

Sheri Levisay

Roger, last but not least we come to you. How did you end up as an EROS intern? When was that?

Roger Auch

My name is Roger Auch. I grew up in Sioux Falls, SD, and I’ve known about EROS for a long time. I think I've visited a couple of two or three times, probably, in grade school and maybe even came out here in high school. I went up to SDSU and kind of wandered around what my majors and, and my calling was going to be. And so I ended up in history degree up there, although I took four regional geography classes. Remember, history needs a location and space to happen, so geography and history are linked together and so I had a history degree up at SDSU and a master’s degree from USD [University of South Dakota] and I got married in 1996. And about a year later, my wife was saying, what are you going to do with your college degree? Since I was kind of working in a good job at a hospital but had nothing to do with my educational background. So I decided to go back up to SDSU, and work on a master’s of geography.  I actually met Kristi in one of my first classes, which was kind of a hybrid class taught by an SDSU geographer who's a land-use geographer, how people use the land, and co-taught by Dr. Tom Loveland from EROS, who’s been mentioned already. And so I had that class in the fall of ’97. And actually it was kind of a two-class part for the whole year. So in the spring of 1999, I went on my first professional conference, it was actually out in Hawaii, and Tom was speaking out there, and so I kind of harassed him a little bit about maybe, you know, I could come work out at EROS. And so I became a a government intern at the age of 37, which was pretty unusual; there was a clause in there that if your research could be linked to your job, you could work full time. So I started full time as an intern in 2000 here at EROS, and then went to the contract side in 2001, and I went back to the government side in 2008, and so been here since 1999.

Sheri Levisay

What's your favorite memory of being an intern?

Roger Auch

So one of the main kind of scientific outputs here out of the science department has been large area land cover mapping. And there is a the National Land Cover Dataset, NLCD, which is fairly common and known now, but in 2000 they were just finishing up the very first one, which had started in ’93 and ’94. And so it was released, I think, in the spring of 2000. So my internship was already kind of working on land use, land cover, in a different project that Tom Loveland had started in ’99, but I was approached with somebody who had been involved with NLCD and he said can you write up a paragraph of what you see when you look at the map? And I thought, wow, that's pretty heavy stuff, when these people have been working on this for six or seven years and they want an intern—OK, an old intern, but an intern—to write up a descriptive paragraph kind of summary for what people can see fairly easily in the map. So I think that was that was pretty cool.

Sheri Levisay

Once your internship was done, what made you stay?

Roger Auch

Well, a certain amount of inertia, right? I'm, I'm a local person. But you know this project that Tom Loveland had started and Kristi was involved with as part of it, we were looking at land use and land cover across the conterminous United States from the beginning of the Landsat era, ’73 through the current time or so, 2000, so 27 years, and you really got to learn a lot about the country on, you know, what is there, where, for land cover, but probably more important for me, what is there for land use? How do we use the land? What stays the same? What changes? What's the drivers of change? And one of the things that going beyond and trying to understand not only basic information and kind of knowledge of what comes from the map generation from, you know, the remote sensing imagery, and turned into derived product. But what are the consequences of land change? What are the good things? What are the bad things? What are the things in between? I could research things until the end of time and I would never be done with them, because there's always something different or something changed or a different angle of research attack that we can do. So I'm a little bit different, I'm a non-technical type of the land cover, land use person, but I don't run out of things to do.

Sheri Levisay

So explain what your position is now.

Roger Auch

So I'm a research geographer kind of specializing in U.S. land use and land cover. And so I am leading under, just mentioned the LCMAP now being combined in with NLCD to become Land Cover Next. And so I'm leading the assessments aspect, kind of trying to understand questions of the drivers of change, whether some of the consequences of change using various, you know, map data sets and other data such as climate data, to kind of understand what's going on where in the country.

Sheri Levisay

One last question for you: What advice would you give to any intern considering working at EROS today?

Jesslyn Brown

Our science department covers so many different topics, so I would think if you were interested in geography or remote sensing, or even some of these topical areas where, you know, the surface of the earth is changing, and we can monitor that using the Landsat record, this would be a great place to be an intern.

Kristi Sayler

It's definitely something that I would advise people to jump on if they get the chance.

Susan Embrock

It is a unique experience. It could be overwhelming because you are really working with very intelligent people, but you learn from those people, and that's where you're going to gain your best knowledge.

Roger Auch

There's a lot of things that people think they know that they may not know all the way, you know, especially in the whole world of social media and 30-second sound bites and things like that. A lot of things get glossed over into kind of generalities of things, and the world is much more complex and dynamic than that, and so we need people who can think beyond 30-second sound bites.

Sheri Levisay

I'd like to thank all of you for sharing your stories about EROS today. And thank you listeners for joining us on Eyes on Earth. You can find all our shows on the USGS EROS website. You can also follow EROS on Facebook or Twitter to find the latest episode or to subscribe on Apple or Google Podcasts. 

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