Hi, Professors Allison and Wallace,
Just thought I’d check in to let you know where I am these days —
It’s only been a year since I left the MC GIS Certificate program, but I’ve already come a long way!
After MC, I took the four-month summer contract at Westat doing imagery analysis. When I left, I soon got an offer from a fellow UMD masters classmate to become the Sales and Marketing Engineer for a small DC-based GIS consultancy firm he owned called New Light Technologies. It still is one of the best companies I’ve worked for in the last ten years of my post-undergrad career. Soon after my hiring though, I was placed on a new 32-hour-a-week contract at FEMA with the same company. It was a good opportunity for the agency to expand in a new capacity they’ve been hoping to for a while. 
I’ve now found myself entrenched in the field of emergency management, making operations and logistics maps for emergency planners in the pre-disaster preparation division of the agency. I’ve also been concurrently working through the UMD masters program as well, which I started back in February. I’m on my second class this summer, a remote sensing course, with a 2021 expected graduation. School and work supplement each other really, really well, and I am so much better at GIS now than I was this time last year. 
Things are going really great for me, and it all started back when I decided to study GIS at MC. Thanks for the support in getting my new career off the ground — it made all the difference!
Hope you both are well!

-TK