The biggest impact I've made so far with GIS has been at Nyrstar. When I arrived in 2017, they were using Surfer and MineSight for their map creation and drillhole planning. Being low-budget mining, it was going to be a difficult task to request money for an ArcGIS license. Instead I found QGIS, an open source GIS software that is surprisingly powerful. Over the course of the last two years, I've used it to integrate data from Engineering, Survey, Land Management, and of course Geology departments. It has become the primary software for our Exploration program and even helped keep Operations running with survey data after a crippling cyber attack in early 2019. I would attribute a large portion of the successful 2018 surface drilling program to the ability to freely manage our spatial data.
LandWorks was my first full-time GIS position. The first few months were exclusively spatial data entry for utility companies, but I later moved up into the Team Lead role where I QC'd other people's work. It was not the most exciting job, but I did learn a lot about land management, surveying techniques, and ArcGIS's drafting tools. Since a lot of the job was repetitive, I spent some time at home creating add-ins to ArcGIS that would save a lot of time jumping between township and range coordinates and legal agreements that needed QC work.
At the University of Arizona, I extensively used ArcGIS during my Masters for interpreting the outline of volcanos buried deep under the ocean. I also used three-dimensional data within ArcGIS to determine an extensional profile of the plateau post-rifting. This was the first time I had to use many of the more complex GIS tools and had to worry more about the presentation aspects of my maps.
When I moved to Houston, I had a hand in the technical aspects of standardizing reservoir maps for our reserve bookings for Thunder Horse at BP. I also volunteered my GIS skills for the National Audubon Society's proposal to create the Bolivar Penninsula Nature Trail.
Although I had been tinkering around with free GIS software in my dorm room since sophomore year, I really had my first experience with GIS during my senior year of undergraduate. We were given a crash course into ArcGIS during our Structural Geology class in order to finish our capstone project of building a cross section of the Powell Valley Anticline. I ended up taking an elective course in GIS, in which I utilized the student license for my undergraduate research into ground penetrating radar attenuation with soil types.
During field camp, we were originally taught to map by hand and paper, and after two weeks, we switched over to using ArcGIS. It was not fun lugging around the computer through the brush and up steep mountains, but I saw how much the technology improved our data collection and resulting maps. We had to make some cross sections near the end of the class, and I thought I would show off by calculating the topographic profile within ArcGIS instead of by hand. It nearly got me in trouble with the teaching assistants. Many geoscientists really embrace and take pride in the old methods of mapping by hand, but the professor understood that I had already grasped the basics.