Even though he’s left the state of Oklahoma, you can still catch DGES alum, Grant Borelli, watching OU sports on the weekends with other OU graduates living in Dallas. Borelli landed in Texas after two years working with Aerial Data Services in Tulsa, his first job post-college. He was looking to move closer to his then-girlfriend, now wife. He took an entry-level position at CRBE, the world’s largest commercial real estate company, and in the four years since, has worked himself up to a senior position as a GIS Specialist.
“I currently help businesses with where they should have distribution centers and warehouses for the most efficient shipping, to helping retailers to determine how many stores they should open, and where they should put them based on customer demographics, competition in the market, and spatial awareness of their current locations,” said Borelli of his current position. He also focuses on electric vehicle charging stations across the nation.
Borelli graduated with a major in GIS in 2017, though he didn’t start out in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability. He was originally an Energy Management major in the Price College of Business. But certain math courses made it clear that Energy Management wasn’t the route Borelli wanted to take with his career. “One of the main things was I like learning about people,” said Borelli. “After doing some research about GIS I found it was all about people.” The safe job opportunities associated with the major also helped him to make the switch. “That was my idea at the time, finding something that was safe and also interesting. But once I started getting into the classes I knew I was in the right place.
Majoring in GIS is directly linked to his professional accomplishments, he says. “The curriculum that A&GS has in general, where it pushes you to take different classes like meteorology to non-western civilizations to human geography, it really just trained me to be able to understand and learn about different fields and ways of thinking,” said Borelli. “Those classes push you to expand your mind and think in different ways.”
One of his favorite memories from his time at OU was using lidar for the first time. “It was cool being able to make something appear 3D, seeing land use in a different way, or seeing how current land use has affected a surrounding landscape. In a different life, I would love to think I could have been an archeologist leveraging lidar to find lost cities.”
Borelli sees the future of geography and GIS as big and bright. “GIS is now a front runner in making decisions in the commercial real estate world,” said Borelli. “We work with a whole
host of different companies that have different problems that we are able to answer with GIS and human geography. This is only going to keep becoming larger as businesses see a data-driven approach with facts to back up why they should or should not go into a location.”
He suggests recent upcoming and recent graduates keep in mind that “the first job may be the worst job,” but every job is a place to gain more knowledge. “The other thing is to try your hardest and show you’re trying your hardest,” said Borelli.
By Kathryn Gebauer
Article Published: Monday, November, 21, 2022
