Hello, my name is Ryan Hegedus and I am currently a junior at Penn State, University Park. I was born and raised in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a town 40 miles south east of Pittsburgh. I am an Environmental Systems Engineering major and would like to work somewhere in that field. I am interested in this course because geography overall interests me, and it is a major requirement. I think this course will be very interesting to see how geography affects the entire world and the role that it plays. Some facts about me are that I am a diehard Penn State football fan, and my family owns a gas station. I have also been an engineering intern at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for the past two summers.

From reading module 1, there have already been numerous geographic matters that I did not know about. Cartographic projection is a fascinating topic to learn about. These projections are distorted all the time to make map viewing easier. If the map were true to scale, it would be very large and difficult to understand. Which is why distorting maps make them easier for people to read. An example of this was found in the module was the London Underground map. The one that’s distorted is not accurate in distance but it makes reading it and finding all the stops a lot easier compared to the other one presented. This is important because cartographic projection makes map reading a lot easier for the average person.