Getting to Know Me: Chris Miller

Hi everyone, my name is Chris Miller.  I’m a senior Finance major at Penn State.  I currently live off-campus in downtown state college.  During my childhood in Pittsburgh, I developed an appreciation for nature by playing in the woods behind our home. I also enjoy lifting and playing basketball in my free-time. This is my fourth year at Penn State and with graduation approaching, I’ve been considering different career options.  I spent the past seven months working at IBM in New York. I’ll either end up in corporate finance or banking. I’m excited to take this course and learn about geography at the college-level.  Specifically, I would like to gain a better understanding of our negative interactions with the environment and how these can be improved.

I’m interested to see how geography can analyze human-environment interactions and help solve global issues.  With this problem I believe it’s essential to look at scale, globalization, and governance.  Many country specific environmental issues have far reaching implications.  We need to examine how globalization increase the strain on these resources and how nations can govern trade to reduce the strain.  This governance should promote sustainability, without economically harming local actors. Over-fishing is a great example because it’s a global problem with severe consequences for local communities.  Governments need to create a sustainable framework of laws and treaties to combat this problem, while keeping scale in mind.  Globalization has increased demand for seafood and people at the local level are incentivized to meet this demand.  Any solution should consider this local scale and explore ways to provide new employment.  A possible solution would be to construct a fishery in the local region, which would meet demand and provide an alternative to fishermen.

2 thoughts on “Getting to Know Me: Chris Miller

  1. Hey Chris, names Gershom Espinoza. (Attached is the link to my bloghttp://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/01/20/getting-to-know-you-gershom-espinoza/)
    While skimming through the entries yours caught my attention because of what major your in (as well as where you recently worked and where you’re heading) as well as similar interests in basketball (yes…I’m a Lakers fan but I hate the arrogant way our team has been managed lately) and sustainability. Though my major is EBF, as one who will be a businessman across multiple sectors, I agree that being aware of the restrictions and benefits is critical. The interesting fact about the over-fishing concern is that every country’s approach to the ocean as a resource is strictly to harvest rather than to manage the resource. As such, it can be frustrating to see no progress being made because every country has no incentive (or very little) to scale back their ‘harvesting’ if other countries won’t do so either. Lastly, I’m also part of the PSU Asset Management Group (quite a market of opportunity lately eh? 😉 and I’ll say I’m not shabby with my bball skills should you ever wanna ball.

  2. Hi Chris! My name is Sara Getson (Here is my blog post where you can learn more about me http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/01/20/introduction-sara-getson/)

    Wow, that’s super cool that you had the opportunity to work for IBM. Was it an internship or more of an actual job? I really liked what you had to say about the human-environment interaction part of geography. I also think that it is a big part of our world and being able to find that balance is critical to our survival here on this earth!

Leave a Reply