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Mapping Her Future
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| Geography Graduate Charts the Course for Legendary Newspaper |
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| Erin Aigner ’99 M.A. ’02 is a cartographer for the Washington Post. |
When Erin Aigner left Portland for Eugene in 1995, it was with dreams of one day returning to set roots in her hometown as an architect.
Nine years later she finds herself far away from the architectural profession and even farther geographically from family and close friends.
But the University of Oregon could not have been more advantageous to the gifted Aigner, who graduated in 1999 with a double major in geography and environmental studies, seized a M.A. in geography three years later, and currently serves as one of four cartographers at the Washington Post.
“I guess you could say it was accidental that I became a cartographer,” Aigner says by telephone from her Washington, D.C., home, where the nation’s capitol building is in view from her street. “It certainly wasn’t my plan.”
The plan was altered by her freshman year when Aigner dropped architecture for geography, but continually put off the major’s required cartography course because of the computer-driven aspect of the curriculum.
“I waited until my senior year to take cartography, but with my interest and background in design I really enjoyed it and I did well,” she says.
Senior Research Associate Jim Meacham gave Aigner college credits for her efforts in helping to complete the Atlas of Lane County during the summer of 1999. Later that year when Meacham needed a cartographer for the Atlas of Oregon, helping to celebrate the 125th anniversary of UO, he called Aigner, who had graduated and was working in a Eugene boutique.
‘Do you want to come back to school?’ Aigner remembers Meacham asking her.
She did, and spent six months in Medford, Oregon, working closely with the book’s co-author Stuart Allen on final production. The experience, more than any other, pulled the curtain on the professional cartographic experience.
“It was a totally eye-opening and invaluable time and really made me think that I could do this for a career,” she says.
That career took a giant step forward in the summer 2002 when Aigner’s UO advisor Susan Hardwick called with an opportunity. “There was an internship in the cartographic division of National Geographic in Washington, D.C.,” Aigner says, “and she had a connection there.”
Aigner got the internship. On August 27, she finished her master’s thesis and two days later she boarded a plane for the nation’s capitol. “My dad and I used to page through National Geographic together,” she says. “I figured it was a great opportunity. I’d be there three months, and I’d come home.”
But two weeks into her internship, Meacham contacted her again. “He said that he knew someone at the Washington Post and they were looking for a cartographer,” Aigner recalls. “The newspaper was only two blocks away, so I figured it would be interesting and maybe I could get an interview.”
Four interview sessions with more than twenty people and one month later, Aigner was offered the job.
“Remember, this was the fall of 2002, and the sniper shootings were going on in D.C. and we were talking about going to war,” she says. “I was asking myself, ‘Do you really want to move here?’ But then I thought if I went home, I’d spend the rest of my life kicking myself and saying, ‘You turned down a job at the Washington Post.’”
Eighteen months later Aigner has settled into her position as a cartographer and artist in the Post’s News and Art departments.
“Six weeks after I started we went to war, so I was making maps of Iraq nearly every day,” she says. “But now I’m doing a lot of metro D.C. maps, as well as more obscure regions for our foreign pages.”
She says the paper gives her creative freedom when the story calls for it, such as the variety of fonts and colors she used on a map of Western Australia for a story on the film Rabbit Proof Fence, or the cartoon version of Mt. Hood she created for a travel story on her home state.
Aigner credits the Washington Post and New York Times for doing more in-house mapping than other newspapers, providing more of an ability to tell a story with a map as opposed to a graphic artist.
“I notice when I read the Oregonian the local maps are by a staff artist,” she says, “but the international maps are mostly all from the wire services.”
Post cartographers have the option of attaching their byline to the maps they create, but Aigner says she decides that on a case-by-case basis. “I recently created a map for a school shooting where a kid was killed, and I didn’t feel right about attaching my name to it. But when I do, there’s something special about having your work delivered to your doorstep each day.”
And though she was born five years after Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story wide open in 1972, Aigner can relate to the history and the star power of the paper she works for.
“I called the paper one Saturday morning to check on a map I was working on,” she remembers. “My editor told me that Bob Woodward was interested in putting the story on the front page.”
“And I said, ‘I’ll be right in.’”
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2004 University of Oregon
Updated June 1, 2004
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