Being awarded the Locate23 Grant was fantastic. It gave me an opportunity to attend the conference without worrying about my financial situation while being there and allowed me to focus on getting the most out of attending the conference. It was a great chance to broaden my views on how geospatial interacts with the real world from applying LiDAR technology to vineyards, using location data in an immersive environment like Virtual reality and collaborating with the space industry. It also was a chance to connect and chat with a wide range of people in our industry in different application areas of geospatial, geographic areas and other young emerging professionals as well. I recommend any young emerging professional to apply for this grant as attending conference is a worthwhile experience and being able to reduce the personal burden to attend it is great.

The Locate conference had so many distinguished guests and speakers. It was an opportunity to speak with colleagues, peers and leaders in the spatial field. What I took away most of all was the positive sense of cooperation everyone held. So many solutions, technologies and partnerships were shared and proposed providing me with an invaluable resource of information I could take with me and implement. Without attending conferences like Locate you can easily be unaware of what possibilities there are, what other companies and teams are doing and how to interact with your spatial community.