Meet the Geographer: Taras Kaduk

Taras Kaduk 
Pronouns: he/him
University of Florida

Who is he?

Taras is a geospatial data scientist and nontraditional student who recently completed an online Bachelor of Arts degree in Geography through UF Online, which was recently ranked the #3 online bachelor’s program by US News and World Reports. He is interested in geospatial data science/geoinformatics/geocomputation, as well as urban studies and urban planning. By day, he is the Senior Manager of Data Analytics at JK Moving Services.

How did he get here?

Taras was born in central Ukraine in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Upon graduating from high school at the top of his class, he moved to Kyiv and enrolled at the Kyiv National Economic University. Taras was quickly recruited into the university’s newly launched computer science program.

Life in the capital quickly proved too expensive for Taras’ student stipend and he started working mornings at McDonald’s before taking classes in the afternoon and studying late into the night. While the additional income helped, city life still proved to be too expensive and in Taras’ second year at the university he took a full time office job at an international moving and storage company. He attempted to work full time and do all of his school work in the evenings, while hoping to do well enough in tests and assignments to make up for his lack of attendance. After 2 years as a student, Taras left Kyiv National Economic University and dove fully into work in the international moving and relocation industry. He spent the next 4 years learning the details of the moving and relocation industry, while practicing his English on a daily basis.

Working closely with clients from all over the world, Taras was inspired by a life lived in different countries and continents, and so he and his wife started exploring various opportunities to move to another country. Despite the immigration options for Ukrainians being very limited worldwide, the Kaduks tried their luck with the U.S. Diversity Visa Program and succeeded on the first try. The Kaduk family chose Jacksonville, FL as their new home, when Taras’ Friend offered them a guest room while they got their footing in their new country.

In Jacksonville, Taras continued to work in the moving and storage industry, but soon was noticed by senior management for his analytical skills and pivoted from operational work to data analytics – getting value out of his computer science background. After several promotions and several moves, he is now a Senior Data Analytics Manager with JK Moving Services. As Taras developed his business analytics skills and became familiar with his new professional roles, he kept finding himself applying his analytical and coding skills to side projects, like analyzing his fitness data in “Analyze and visualize your iPhone’s Health app data in R”, or sharing general insights into the life cycle of data analytics in “4 Stages Of Data Analytics Maturity: Challenging Gartner’s Model”.

Sometimes these passion projects took on spatial aspects like his explainer on how to “Create World Pixel Maps in R” or his attempt to find cities with good weather in “Where are the places with the best (and the worst) weather in the United States?”. Working on these geospatial projects helped him find his passion for geography.

Despite his professional success, Taras had always regretted not completing his degree. As a data professional, he considered finishing his degree in computer science or working on a degree in statistics. After exploring many options, Taras decided to major in geography: having an intrinsic interest in the subject would ease the hard work required to finish a degree as a working adult with a family, and he would enjoy his learning along the way.

What’s he been doing at UF?

When Taras learned about the UF Online program – ranked among the nation’s top five bachelor’s programs by US News and World Reports – he realized it was the perfect match for his busy life – there was a wide range of course offerings, flexible scheduling, and he could do it all from his home or office.

During a brief time studying at the Florida State College at Jacksonville, Taras found an earth science class intrinsically interesting. That coupled with his curiosity about spatial data, love of the R programming language, and location driven questions made Geography the perfect fit. Given his interest in geography, his expertise in data analytics, and his command of the R programming language, Taras realized that geospatial data science would be a good supplement to his current expertise.

Taras joined the Geography department through the UF Online program, which was recently ranked the #3 online bachelor’s program in the United States by US News and World Reports for his final 4 semesters of college. During that time, he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Geography with an undergraduate certificate in Geospatial Information Analysis, graduating in December 2020.

Taras enjoyed all the geography courses he took, including GEO2242 Extreme Weather, GEA3405 Geography of Latin America, GEO3502 Economic Geography, and his GIS courses (GIS3043, GIS4102C and others) and electives (like UPR 3001 and ANT 3451) were equally fascinating and enriching.

As Taras developed his geospatial analysis toolkit, he worked on several projects with a geographic and urban component including “Analysis of Kyiv Road Traffic Using Uber Movement Data” or programmatically generating city street maps in “Print Personalized Street Maps Using R”.

How has he been holding up during the pandemic?
Prior to immigrating to the United States, Taras was an avid cyclist, photographer, and musician, but has found that it’s hard to keep up hobbies while working full time, being a parent, and adapting to life in a new country.

A generally introverted person who works and studies from home full-time, Taras thought the lockdowns and the social distancing wouldn’t affect him much, but the pandemic has been hard on everyone. He has managed to stay sane during the pandemic by spending more quality time with his wife and son, investing time in long-distance friendships around the globe by regularly connecting over Zoom, replacing strength workouts at the gym with more pandemic-friendly running and yoga, staying busy with work, school, and housekeeping, and working on his leg sleeve tattoo with his tattoo artist wife.

Taras still likes to work with geospatial data in his spare time, and he continues to expand his toolkit, trying his hand at cartography, geocomputation in Python, and transportation modeling in R. Now that his schooling is done (for the time being), he is hoping to invest more time in photography and music, as well as catch up on all the purchased – yet unread – books.

Follow Taras on:
Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, and taraskaduk.com

Credit: Mike Ryan Simonovich