Maps, Not Ladders
How a Geography Major Built a Nonlinear Career in Digital Strategy and Consulting
When I started college, I was a political science major doing the “sensible” thing.
Then I took one geography class.
It felt like someone had quietly swapped out a black-and-white TV for a color one. The material came easily. I was actually excited to go to class.
At one point, our geography class started working on a project with a nearby elementary school: we were teaching kids about geography by painting a world map on their playground—true to scale, correctly facing north. We spent hours outside with brushes and paint, turning asphalt into a teaching tool.
In the middle of that quarter, my professor, Dr. William Bailey, pulled me aside and said, “You should think about changing your major.”
I was already obsessed with maps and geography from a young age, so the content felt like home. At the same time, I was watching my dad go to a job he did not enjoy. He’d done the “right” thing his whole life. It made an impression.
I didn’t know what you were supposed to do with a Geography degree. I only knew this: I loved it, I was good at it, and I had a better shot at enjoying my career if I started from something I actually found interesting.
So I changed my major.
People reacted the way you’d expect:
“What can you even do with that?”
“So… you know where everything is?”
(My honest answer: yes, I do know where most things are. But geography is a lot more than that.)
Even my parents were concerned. I understood why, but I wasn’t dissuaded. I had already seen what it looks like to stay loyal to a “sensible” path you don’t like. I didn’t want that.
That decision set me on a path that looks nothing like a neat corporate ladder and everything like a long, winding road trip: GIS, spatial analysis, sales, commercial real estate, web development, digital strategy, and now consulting.
Looking back, I don’t see a ladder. I see a map.
And that “map” mentality is what I wish more people had when they think about their own careers.
Geography: Learning to See Patterns, Not Just Places
I didn’t fall in love with geography because I wanted to memorize state capitals. I was obsessed with how places came to be.
Why is this city here and not there?
Why do certain streets have this mix of shops and others don’t?
Why do some neighborhoods thrive while others stall, even if they’re only a few blocks apart?
I gravitated toward cultural geography—how physical space and human behavior shape each other. At the same time, I was drawn to technology, particularly this emerging field called GIS (Geographic Information Systems). It felt like magic: you could stack layers of data—roads, demographics, zoning, retail locations—and suddenly you weren’t just looking at a map, you were looking at patterns, tradeoffs, and possibilities.
My favorite project in college was a 50-page paper on our college town:
How it came to be
How it evolved over time
How physical geography shaped the culture, and how culture reshaped the physical space
That paper was more than a grade. It was rehearsal for how I would eventually think about organizations: complex, layered systems that evolve over time.
Two big superpowers came out of that season:
Pattern recognition – seeing how different things connect and influence each other.
Critical thinking – asking “why is this like this?” instead of just accepting that it is.
I also happen to have a bizarre spatial photographic memory, which is handy at parties and occasionally in consulting, but it’s the pattern recognition and critical thinking that have really stuck.
I’m still grateful for Dr. William Bailey—not just for nudging me toward the major, but for opening doors to my first geography-focused roles and expanding my imagination about what a career could look like.
City of Marietta: From Paper Maps to Real Problems
My first “real” geography job was in the GIS department at the City of Marietta, a city in the Atlanta suburbs.
The office always smelled a little musty and old, like a basement that had seen a lot of summers. Rolled-up paper maps leaned against walls and sat in racks, and I felt strangely at home among them. I’d spent countless hours in college poring over similar maps in linoleum-floored labs, tracing roads and rivers with my eyes.
The department had just transitioned from ink-and-mylar maps to digital. It was early days. A lot of my job was building on those initial digital foundations.
Two projects from that season still shape how I think about work.
1. Digitizing the Zoning Map
Someone had to encode every single parcel in the city’s database with the correct zoning designation.
That someone was me.
It was tedious, detailed work—exactly the kind of thing that punishes sloppiness. It taught me that if you get the foundation wrong, everything else is off. It also taught me that “boring” work is often the work everything else quietly depends on.
2. Rebuilding a Broken Process
The other project was more interesting.
If a property owner wanted to rezone their parcel, the city had to notify owners within a certain distance. The process looked like this:
Someone in GIS manually calculated, on paper maps, which parcels fell within that distance.
Someone in the tax department looked up all the associated property owners and contact info.
Someone manually created and sent letters to all those people.
Start to finish, it could take 2–3 weeks.
I developed a GIS application that automated the entire process. What used to take weeks could now be done in under five minutes.
Same city. Same laws. Same people. Completely different system.
That’s when I realized I didn’t just want to make maps. I wanted to redesign how systems worked.
Loyalty, Pay, and the Moment I Realized No One Was Coming to Save My Career
For all the satisfaction of the work, the culture told a different story.
I started hearing language about being “loyal” to the city—as if loyalty was a one-way street. That has always rubbed me the wrong way. Loyalty is a good thing, but in a healthy relationship it’s mutual. My loyalty to an employer is commensurate with the loyalty they show me.
At Marietta, that wasn’t the case.
I noticed pretty quickly that hard work wasn’t rewarded. Compensation was about time-in-seat, not value created. I was promised that my pay would be brought up to industry standards; it never happened. A co-worker who stayed got a 25-cent-per-hour raise.
A quarter.
I left after a year.
The lesson was painfully simple: no one cares about your career as much as you do. If you wait passively for organizations to recognize you, you might be waiting a long time.
It wasn’t the last time I’d learn that lesson, but it might have been the clearest.
Claritas and Starbucks: The Accidental Salesperson
A couple of years later, I moved to San Diego for a GIS role with Claritas as an application consultant.
It was a great hybrid role: part technical, part client-facing. I acted as a liaison between clients and our development team, translating business questions into spatial and analytical solutions. One of my main clients was Starbucks.
After about a year, the account executive who “owned” the Starbucks relationship left the company. The folks at Starbucks went to our VP of Sales and said something that surprised me:
“We want Will as our account executive.”
I had never been in sales. My mental model of salespeople was closer to “used car lot” than “trusted advisor.” I was wary.
The VP of Sales, Howard Shuster, sat me down and reframed it completely:
He didn’t want me to push things people didn’t need.
I already believed in the value of what we did.
My GIS background and existing relationship with Starbucks were assets, not liabilities.
In other words: I didn’t have to become someone else to succeed in this role.
So I took the job.
That pivot—from GIS consultant to account executive—was a big one. It taught me:
You can change hats without changing your core. My understanding of geography and spatial data didn’t disappear; it just expressed itself through conversations, deals, and long-term relationships.
People will often see possibilities in you that you don’t see yet. Starbucks trusted me to step up before I would have thought to ask.
I’m grateful to Howard for that reframing. He helped me see sales as an extension of service and conviction, not manipulation.
When a “Strategic Role” Isn’t Strategic at All
My next move looked great on paper: a commercial real estate agent role.
I imagined helping large companies make thoughtful decisions about their real estate strategy—where to locate, how to think about markets, how to use data and geography to inform long-term decisions.
The reality?
It was 100% commission.
I had almost zero influence on strategy.
My job was essentially order-taking, not advising.
The work was almost entirely about who you knew, not what you knew.
In retrospect, I didn’t do my due diligence going into that role. I heard “commercial real estate” and projected a strategic, advisory future onto it without interrogating the actual incentives and day-to-day work. If I could rewind, I probably wouldn’t make that same move again.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that model, but it wasn’t me.
So I pivoted again—this time into a business development/consulting role at a commercial real estate information services provider. The new role blended:
My knowledge of real estate decision-making,
My analytical skills,
My people skills.
In that environment, I thrived. I became one of the top account executives in the organization—not because I turned into a caricature of a salesperson, but because the role finally aligned with my wiring.
The lesson: sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re not good enough—it’s that the role is misaligned with who you are and how you add value. And sometimes the lesson is that you jumped too fast and need to be more honest about what a role really is before you sign up.
Teaching Myself Drupal and Getting in Over My Head (In a Good Way)
After several years away from hands-on technical work, I got curious again.
On the side, I taught myself Drupal, an open-source content management system. It was just a little project at first—a way to stretch my brain and pick up a new skill.
Then the 2008 recession hit commercial real estate hard. Timing, as they say, is everything.
I started freelancing as a web developer, building Drupal sites for clients. That eventually led to a job with a public company in Atlanta, managing all of their Drupal-based digital platforms.
I thought I was just building websites.
In reality, I had become:
A project/program manager
A DevOps engineer
The primary liaison with our external web agency
The person responsible for ensuring that our digital properties worked when it mattered—like during quarterly earnings
At one point, I was asked to make our client-facing site multilingual in five languages. I’d never done it before. There was no dramatic speech, no inspirational soundtrack. I just had to figure it out.
The part of the job that stands out in my memory is earnings season. My small cubicle sat in a sea of other cubes—phones ringing, low conversations, the constant hum of printers. I was already fighting to concentrate when, a few hours before the release, executive leaders would quietly cluster around the back of my chair to watch me post the quarterly earnings report.
I could feel them standing there—ties, perfume, the faint jingle of ID badges—breathing over my shoulder while I clicked through the CMS. It was claustrophobic and distracting, all fluorescent lights and buzzing HVAC.
After the third time this happened, I turned to the CMO and said:
“If you don’t trust me to do this, you should fire me.”
He didn’t love the comment, but he left. I never missed a deadline or botched a release.
Once again, I ran into a culture where raises went to people who had “waited their turn,” not necessarily those doing the most critical work. I wanted a place where work ethic, smart execution, and collaboration mattered more than politics and tenure.
So, eventually, I left again.
Moving Into Consulting: People, Problems, and Culture
Consulting had been on my radar for a while, but for many years it wasn’t practical. As my daughters were growing up, I wasn’t willing to live on the road the way many firms required.
Later in my career, the timing and circumstances finally lined up.
I moved into consulting because:
I was ready to step away from hands-on coding as my primary job.
I missed people-facing work and complex problem solving.
I wanted to work somewhere that genuinely valued collaboration, good people, and smart execution over theatrics.
Honestly, I cared more about culture than the exact job description.
During the hiring process, there were some questions about how to staff someone with my particular mix of skills and experiences. I made my pitch directly:
“I’m a quick learner. I’ll get staffed. I’ll deliver.”
That’s been true. I don’t say that arrogantly; it’s just what happens when you put someone who loves learning and problem-solving into environments where both are required.
From the outside, my resume might look like a zigzag.
From the inside, it feels like one long, winding road trip, shaped by a few consistent forces:
A desire to keep learning new things
An analytical, problem-solving mindset
A strong preference for people-facing work
An insistence on healthy culture—places where good people collaborate and smart work is actually valued
A belief that loyalty, if it’s going to mean anything, has to run both ways
Careers as Road Trips, Not Ladders
I’ve never thought much in terms of ladders.
I didn’t chase titles or prestige. Partly because of what I saw in my dad’s career, I never fully trusted the “work hard for 40 years in one place and you’ll be fine” story. And the early Internet days made it obvious that the landscape was changing fast.
That old story also doesn’t match the data anymore. Most estimates suggest the average person will change careers somewhere between five and seven times over their working life, and hold roughly a dozen different jobs along the way.
If I had to pick a metaphor, my career feels more like a road trip:
Some stretches are boring because you’ve driven them a hundred times.
Some stretches you endure because they’re simply part of getting somewhere.
Occasionally there are breakdowns on the side of the road.
And then there are moments when you crest a ridge and see an unexpectedly beautiful view and realize, That was worth it.
On a road trip, the journey matters as much as the destination. You don’t measure success by how quickly you reach a single point; you measure it by whether the route was meaningful, whether you liked your traveling companions, and whether you became someone wiser along the way.
When I consider new opportunities now, I ask three simple questions:
Do I believe in this organization’s mission and values?
Are these people I want to work with and trust?
Can I be my authentic self here, and will this role bring out the best in me?
Those questions won’t show up on a corporate career ladder. But they’re essential if you’re trying to navigate a map.
If You Hate Your Major (or Your First Job)
If you’re early in your career and panicking that your major—or your first job—is “useless,” here’s what I’d say:
First, take a breath. A career is a long journey. You are not locked into a single lane.
I also want to acknowledge this: not everyone has the same freedom to pivot. Family responsibilities, debt, immigration status, health, geography—these all shape what’s possible. Any advice about “just change jobs” that ignores that reality isn’t honest.
Within those constraints, though, you still have more room than you think.
Start with questions:
What actually matters to you in a career?
What kinds of problems make you lose track of time?
What kinds of environments bring out your best self—and which ones crush you?
You don’t have to stay on the main highway just because everyone else is on it. There are side roads, scenic routes, and entirely different regions you haven’t explored yet.
In the next 90 days, you don’t need to overhaul your life. You can simply:
Figure out what drives you.
Pay attention to when you feel energized vs. depleted. That’s data.Connect with people.
Reach out to folks doing interesting work. Ask questions. Listen. Some of the most important turns in my career came from people who saw something in me I hadn’t fully named yet.Bet on yourself.
That might mean taking on a project that stretches you, teaching yourself a new tool at night, or saying “no” to a role that looks good on paper but feels wrong in your gut.
Your major is a starting coordinate, not a prison cell. Your first job is a mile marker, not your destiny.
What I’d Tell My Younger Self
If I could talk to college-senior Will, or early-career GIS-analyst Will, I’d say:
Ambition and success: Don’t measure success solely by title or income. Measure it by whether you’re doing work that fits your wiring, serves others, and allows you to be present to the rest of your life.
Money and stability: Money matters. Stability matters. But don’t stay somewhere that deadens you just because the paycheck is predictable. There are other routes.
Risk and staying put: You don’t have to jump at every opportunity. But when you feel a deep, persistent misalignment, pay attention. Staying put is also a risk.
And I’d remind him of something that has been quietly true all along:
The path won’t make sense to everyone else while you’re walking it. That’s okay.
You’re not climbing a ladder. You’re navigating a map.
The question isn’t, “What rung should I be on by now?”
The question is, “Given who I am, what I care about, and what I’ve learned so far… where is the next wise step on this road trip?”
And then you take it.
What might change if you treated your own career less like a ladder to climb and more like a map to explore?