Were you a good geography student in school?

[golden eagle]

I took geography in college as well. Easy A for me too! I think it was a required class rather than an elective.

[Roadgeek Adam]

My college does not offer geography sadly

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

My college does not offer geography sadly

You need to look up one of the schools on this list linked below.
https://communicate.aag.org/eseries/scriptcontent/custom/giwis/cguide/opportunity/cguide_education.cfm

[Roadgeek Adam]

My college does not offer geography sadly

You need to look up one of the schools on this list linked below.
https://communicate.aag.org/eseries/scriptcontent/custom/giwis/cguide/opportunity/cguide_education.cfm

Montclair State University   Montclair   NJ   07043-1624   

• 
  Rowan University   Glassboro   NJ   08028   
• 
  Rutgers University   New Brunswick   NJ   08901-1281   
• 
  

I am not rich. This is really out of my league, despite that I live a stone's throw from Rutgers.

[J N Winkler]

Rutgers is a state university.  Might scholarships be available?

[english si]

I used to wind up my geography teachers, out doing them and correcting them. But only when it came to where things were, and mapping.* I sucked at GCSE (high-school leaving exams at 16) Geography partially because I was too adventurous and off piste with my project, partially as I couldn't write essays, partially as I never did much work, and partially because the syllabus sucked and I had to remember a lot of pointless facts about case studies (who cares about the order of plants they used when they turned a quarry in Africa into a safari park?). From getting 96% in my internal exams at 14, I slipped down to getting a C (which at my school was practically considered a fail at GCSE, though nationally it was the bottom grade of a good pass).

I love geography, but I the things I'm good at (where stuff is, maps, etc) play a tiny part in the subject academically and our national curriculum for geography at GCSE level is really annoying - it's about jumping through hoops (most GCSEs are), agreeing with the political preferences of the exam board (English was too and also had a bigger "don't argue with the experts" policy, but that's another subject and for another time). When I started my GCSEs I planned on doing Geography as an A-level (16 to 18), but I quickly found it to be a complete chore. My teacher didn't have an effect on it (other than the topics he chose - I'd have loved to do weather, but we did plate tectonics, which we did a couple of years before) - he was good. The GCSE structure and syllabus just completely put me off the subject academically, in the same way that having to write essays meant I dropped History at 14 - I loved history, just not studying it academically.

In short, I guess I was an awful geography student - cocky, knowledgeable (but not on the right things for the exam), bored, lazy and without any real passion for what was being studied.

*for instance, me and a few of my friends, who were in the Scouts (and by that time among the oldest there, so having to know stuff), really wound up the teacher by, when we were learning grid references, kept on doing 8-figure grid-references (accuracy 10m), when, unless you are in the army (or did the night hike that scouts in our area did), you'd only ever bother with 6-figure references. I guess it was mostly as we had been doing grid references for at least 4 years, and were bored. Another time, the text book showed a map of Castletown, in the Peak District and was discussing the quarry. I remembered from my time looking at old maps that the A road to the town used to leave the other side (I hadn't learnt that it had collapsed in the mountain pass repeatedly, so they stopped trying to fix it) and was an important cross-Pennine road. One of the things mentioned by the teacher was that the freight traffic had caused the road to the quarry to be upgraded - I put up a fight, but I didn't have an old map of that area to hand, so I failed to persuade him that the road wasn't an A road because of the quarry (for one thing, it went to the town not the quarry, for another, the quarry was nearly 2 miles off this road).

[froggie]

Always been good at geography.  Though as with corco, I've gravitated more towards the GIS side.  Doesn't hurt that I've been using GIS in my duties for the past 5 years...

As for...

To this day, I see no empirical difference between Montpelier and Burlington

Besides one being about 5 times the size of the other?

[akotchi]

I did well in the one geography class I had in junior high school.  The U.S. geography units were done regionally and, interestingly, included map exercises on which we were to locate the major Interstate highways in the region.  This was back when I-86 still existed in Connecticut.

[triplemultiplex]

It's cool to hear other people that participated in the geography bee in middle school.  I went to state in both 7th and 8th grade but didn't make it out of the first round.  I thought I was a big geography buff, but I was no match for those freak show home schooled kids that probably never have any fun while their parents dump their unfulfilled ambition on them.

Anyway, geography started as hobby, became a major in college and now it's my career; making maps.  My love of maps in school helped me excel at history/social studies since those textbooks all had cool maps in them.  I didn't have an option to take a geography class before college.  I was constantly doodling interchanges and towns and stuff in the margins of notebooks and on book covers since at least 6th grade for sure; probably 4th.  I still do that in meetings sometimes.  I recall one textbook with elevation maps of all the continents, so I used notebook paper to trace the continents if sea level were 200 or 500 feet higher; whatever the lowest contour was.  Then I'd redraw boundaries to even up the area of the states or give the Dutch a new homeland just as examples.

I constantly have a supply of fine point pens and whiteout pens so I can make corrections to my Rand McNally or my Delorme when needed. (That reminds me, screw you Delorme for changing the linework in the Wisconsin atlas to that pile of crap. The linework is worse, the classifications are often wrong, you can't see grade separations or interchange configurations, the road shields are just awful, and most importantly, I can't correct your mistakes very well. I'm going to have to make my current copy last forever now.)  I've also gotta have a "play copy" of those atlases so I can draw out my road ideas.

[cu2010]

Of course I was a good geography student in school. On map tests, I always got perfect scores. Granted, I did nothing with it past high school (I studied finance in college) but it still remains a hobby.

I also had an old DeLorme NYS atlas that I used to make corrections to as well...the one I had was so old, I-86 hadn't been designated yet, so I hand-drew in the shields.  I also hand-drew the section of 86 around Corning in, as that atlas did not show it...and that version of the atlas didn't have the exit numbers in there, either, so I wrote them in myself as well (though only upstate...the downstate highways have so many exits that writing them in just started to get messy so I gave up).  That was also the same atlas that eventually became unreadable due to having twenty-zillion colors of marker over the same roads and eventually got replaced.

I also used to buy a new Rand McNally every year, but I stopped doing that after I started college, mostly because I was broke, not to mention that I discovered that the Rand McNally atlas is a piece of crap anyways.

I'm still good at geography, and would rather carry a map (or five) on a roadtrip than use one of those stupid useless GPS devices...those things are annoying.

[agentsteel53]

I'm still good at geography, and would rather carry a map (or five) on a roadtrip than use one of those stupid useless GPS devices...those things are annoying.

I don't get the antipathy towards GPS devices.  They tend to be complementary.  The GPS shows you things on a very zoomed-in level, and is fairly inadequate for strategic planning - but, with the map, unless you carry a million of them, you're not going to get a street-level view of everywhere you're going.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

I'm still good at geography, and would rather carry a map (or five) on a roadtrip than use one of those stupid useless GPS devices...those things are annoying.

I don't get the antipathy towards GPS devices.  They tend to be complementary.  The GPS shows you things on a very zoomed-in level, and is fairly inadequate for strategic planning - but, with the map, unless you carry a million of them, you're not going to get a street-level view of everywhere you're going.

Depends on the purpose.  I'd use a GPS if I was visiting a series of locations, especially minut locations not shown on maps.
If you're going from Point A to Point B, you use a map.  And not necessarily a big roadmap or Rand McNally.  If I'm unsure of an address, I'll look it up on google maps, locate it, and print a map focusing on the location. 
I don't need to be told how to get there, just where I'll be.

[agentsteel53]

Depends on the purpose.  I'd use a GPS if I was visiting a series of locations, especially minut locations not shown on maps.
If you're going from Point A to Point B, you use a map.  And not necessarily a big roadmap or Rand McNally.  If I'm unsure of an address, I'll look it up on google maps, locate it, and print a map focusing on the location. 
I don't need to be told how to get there, just where I'll be.

I can usually figure out approximately how to get somewhere, but for the last mile or so, with small streets and whatnot, it is infinitely helpful to have a local map.  And I'm just too lazy to print one out from Google Maps - especially if I'm on the road for a week and access to printers is limited.

plus the GPS really helps with identifying old alignments, as they tend to be shown as perfectly viable roads!