UI geography majors can now save a year of time and tuition with a new geoinformatics-degree program.

The UI Geographical & Sustainability Sciences Department recently announced a new undergraduate-to-graduate geoinformatics program that allows undergraduate majors to complete master’s degrees in geoinformatics in just five years instead of the traditional six.

Department head Dave Bennett said the purpose of the program is to save students’ resources while better preparing them for the workforce.

Of the four programs in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Informatics, geoinformatics is the newest, starting four years ago as a master’s program, he said.

“We’ve got programs in health informatics, bioinformatics, geoinformatics, and information science, and associated faculty are spread throughout the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, management sciences, library and information science, and engineering,” Bennett said.

Geoinformatics, or Geographic Information Systems, is the foundation of several services people use every day, such as Google maps, Uber, and Bongo, Bennett said. GIS is the system that helps people understand, capture, and manage the world around them in computerized form.

“A lot of people are out there using GIS — urban planners, natural-resource managers — they’ll use the technology, and they may not need that much computer science to do that,” he said. “This is more for the person who will develop the systems.”

Interested students are eligible to apply in the third year of their undergraduate program, and the shared coursework starts in their fourth year. Even though students are working on a graduate degree, they’re only charged undergraduate tuition during their fourth year.

Bennett said his intention is to further develop students’ skills in both geography and computer science with the extra year in the program. He worked with many faculty members in his department to develop the program proposal.

“We realized if you look into our program as an undergraduate major in GIS and the GIS master’s program, there is some overlap in the senior year. You actually have a bunch of courses that overlap quite a bit,” said Caglar Koylu, an assistant professor who will teach in the program once it gets underway.

Six students committed to the program in the first two weeks after the department announced it.

Ian Klopfenstein is one of the six students going through the application process, and he is exploring options for his thesis project and research options. He said the opportunity fell in his lap, more or less.

“One of my professors contacted me about the program and told me I would be a good candidate due to my interest in the field of geoinformatics,” he said. “Because I had completed the majority of my undergraduate degree already, it seemed the logical next step for my studies.”

Klopfenstein is excited to jump head-first into master’s work.

“The field uses existing software to model human-environmental interactions and also has to do with the development of new geospatial modeling software,” he said. “This is especially pertinent as our climate and environment begins to shift and new demographic patterns arise, so we can more fully understand the spatial nature of these phenomena.”