Major: Geospatial Information Sciences
Internship Placement: Dallas County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management
For her EPPS internship, Kashmere Naomi Bates worked for the Dallas County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management with the goal of understanding the many ways Geospatial Information Sciences are used in emergency planning.
After completing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) training courses, Kashmere’s first project was to create a database of hurricane shelters in the northwest and southwest quadrants of Dallas County that citizens can access on Google Maps in case of an evacuation. She was then tasked with completing maps for the rest of the Dallas County, which proved especially challenging since she was starting from scratch. Later she was tasked with mapping out areas that would most likely to be impacted in case of a pandemic in Dallas County.
The DHSEM internship was a great opportunity for Kashmere to get more hands-on experience while pursuing her degree in GIS. “I learned that it was extraordinarily important that everything worked together,” she says, explaining that if there wasn’t a map of a location and available amenities then a hurricane evacuee might not be able to access these resources leading to immense consequences and chaos.
