An Introduction to My Work at International Mapping

     Hi there, my name is Tyler Kruzshak, a Senior history and political science student at
UMBC, and this semester I am interning with International Mapping, a GIS consulting firm
based out of Ellicott City. I was placed in touch with this company through the UMBC CAHSS
Career Fair in 2022 and started interning there in late 2022. This internship has actually been my
first experience working in my intended field and has granted me significant insight into working
a professional career upon graduation.
    My work at the internship is research concerning the historical and contemporary borders
between states and writing what are called Boundary Briefs. Each Boundary Brief concerns a
specific maritime or land boundary between states and generally includes an introduction to the
boundary, a timeline of events regarding it, as well as notes and discussion of treaties pertaining
to the boundary. The research and write-up typically takes between five and eight hours per brief
and involves finding and reading treaties between states, describing various aspects of the
boundary such as length, geography, or background to each treaty, and then researching about the
political or economic aspects of the boundary today. This research is then forwarded to my boss
who compiles the information with maps of each particular border and forwards the finalized
document to me for review. These are intended to be uploaded to a mapping database
International Mapping has developed called Sovereign Limits. My work typically focuses on
former Warsaw Pact member states and post-Soviet states. I find this genuinely interesting since I am largely able to apply my Russian linguistic skills that I have acquired here at UMBC to this
work. For instance, while many treaties that I must analyze are officially translated by the United
Nations, if a treaty has not been officially ratified or submitted to the United Nations then finding
an English translation of it is extremely difficult. Instead, I must utilize my knowledge of the
Russian language to translate the treaties of the borders that I am discussing in my reports.
    Overall, I thoroughly enjoy the work I am doing at International Mapping and I hope to
have more interesting updates regarding it for the future.

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