A portfolio is a way to demonstrate your skills and abilities – in anything, from drawing and painting to writing – including geographic papers, map and field projects, and GIS. In its simplest form, a portfolio is a collection of your work: you choose it, you add captions to explain it, you improve it over time. The UMW Department of Geography recognizes the value of a portfolio to demonstrate a student’s undergraduate career, and we recommend that all students consider creating one.
This is YOUR portfolio. Think about who might read it and what you want them to know about you. Include class projects or papers – but make the edits your professor suggested! Ask a professor to read through the latest version. Include your resume and a cover letter if you are job hunting. Work with the Center for Career and Professional Development on those items.
Your portfolio might be a PDF or a series of slides or a website. If it is a website, you are also demonstrating to a potential employer or graduate school your skills in building web pages! Undergraduate students at UMW are encouraged to consider UMW’s Domain of One’s Own program (in which any undergraduate may create a domain, using Word Press, and has the option of taking it with them when they graduate), or you could develop your own using Esri Story Maps or another program.
Examples?! Please send me yours to include here!