Hi everyone! My name is Jake Segall. Currently, I am a senior in Meteorology at Penn State. I was born and raised in State College, PA (not including the three years I spent in Washington while my dad taught for Washington State University) and still live there now. As a meteorologist, my interests lie with radar meteorology, though mesoscale dynamics (aka Severe Weather) will always be my true passion. I would love to end up storm chasing for the rest of my life, but that does not pay the bills, and for that matter I am interested in going to grad school to pursue a masters and hopefully a PhD in either radar meteorology, mesoscale dynamics, or heliophysics. I am interested to see what I can learn from this class as I have spent most of my time worrying about what is going on above the earth’s surface, and not so much time worrying about what is happening at the surface.

Geography seems to be well suited to partner with other social sciences, specifically sociology. As very effective visualization tools, maps can really hammer a put through when it is need and, in today’s world, it appears as though certain issues such as the remnants of racism or the displacement of huge populations could be effectively communicated using geographic resources. Though it was introduced to us from an environmental standpoint, governance over these issues plays a large role in our world as well. How do we handle mass migration of people to certain areas, how do we quell and put an end to racism?