A master’s degree in geographic information systems (MGIS) from Penn State helped shape the trajectory of Jimmy Kroon’s career.
Kroon joined the Delaware Department of Agriculture in 2003 as a summer employee doing fieldwork and building expertise in GIS through field crop surveys for pests and plant diseases. He enrolled in Penn State’s online MGIS program while continuing to work full-time and graduated in 2011. What followed was a steady climb from GIS coordinator to farmland preservation program director to deputy secretary, where he helps shape agricultural policy for the state of Delaware.
Along the way, he stayed connected to Penn State, teaching GEOG 863 and advising capstone students.
Kroon shared more about his work and his experience in the Q&A below.
You’ve spent your entire career at the Delaware Department of Agriculture. What has kept you there, and what drew you deeper into agriculture over time?
Food is something everybody cares about, because everybody eats. It’s a huge part of our industry, economy, and land use in Delaware.
It’s people’s lifestyle as well as their occupation. For people who are in agriculture, it’s quite often their whole life, from sunrise to sunset.
You started using GIS doing field crop surveys for pests and plant diseases. How did that hands-on experience lead you to pursue a master’s degree in GIS through Penn State?
GIS is really a way to combine my interest in the natural world and technology. I’ve always found computers intuitive, and I’ve always seen value in combining different areas of expertise. GIS gave me a way to bring those interests together through technical problem-solving tied to the environment and the world around us.
What’s a project from your GIS work that you’re most proud of?
All the monitoring is done using field maps now. We can click on the boundary, open the mobile app, take photos, record the information, and store it right there. Now staff can open a web application and view the data themselves.
You’ve talked about GIS becoming more accessible to non-specialists. What does that shift mean for the field?
Web applications are the portal where people who are not GIS experts do their own work. They get access to their own data; they can even perform their own analysis now. It’s really been a revolution in who is a GIS user.
As your career moved away from day-to-day GIS work and into broader leadership, what from your Penn State education stayed with you?
Some of the course work I found most valuable, even after I stopped using GIS every day, was systems analysis and project management. Those courses focused on the people side of GIS projects, but every project has a people side, and in many ways, that can matter as much as the technology.
If you can take a problem and break it down into steps and understand the logic behind it, that helps outside of coding, too. If something isn’t working, you have to ask where the break point is and what is causing it to go wrong.
You also stayed connected to Penn State after graduating — teaching and advising students. What did that experience mean to you?
I really loved working with students. I always liked interacting with students and being able to provide feedback and guidance. It’s been rewarding to hear from students later and learn that the course shaped the way they think about GIS and how they use it in their full-time jobs.
What does agriculture mean to you at this point in your career, and what keeps you focused on it?
A lot of farm operations really struggle to be profitable. We’re trying to figure out how to help, whether through financial programs like low-interest loans or by improving agricultural markets so producers can sell their products for more. That’s really what’s needed.
This Q&A is part of “40k alumni: 40 stories celebrating 40,000 graduates,” a series marking the milestone of more than 40,000 Penn Staters earning their degrees online through Penn State World Campus.