With a strength of approximately 40,000 students, including 7,500 international students from over 130 countries, it’s on course to be one of the leading knowledge centres in the world. Located in Sidney, the university is situated near the business hub of Australia’s largest city. The 38-acre Kensington site, housing the main campus consists of state-of-the-art faculty and service facilities that combine to provide an ideal educational and communal environment for all students. One of the founding members of the Group of Eight leading research universities in Australia and the prestigious Universitas 21, the international consortium, the UNSW is involved in a number of activities and research programmes. It is currently involved in 15 cooperative research centres and a similar number of national research centres together with some 50 internal research centres and several centres operated in conjunction with other universities.

The university was incorporated by an Act of the Parliament of New South Wales in Sidney in 1949 as the New South Wales University of Technology. After over half-a-century, it has transformed into the University of New South Wales and come a long way to be one of Australia’s top universities. It has 10 faculties and offers over 900 undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Courses in spatial information systems are offered by the School of Biology, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES) of the Faculty of Science and the School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems of the Faculty of Engineering at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Besides, the university also offers short term courses in spatial information systems in association with the Cooperative Research Centre in Spatial Information.

Graduate courses
The School of Biology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, which is a part of the Faculty of Science, offers a variety of courses in GIS at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Recognising the increasing importance of spatial studies in businesses, governments, decision-making and the overall development of the country, BEES has been offering students the choice to include spatial information systems in a double major with disciplines such as geography, geology, environmental earth science, biological science and many others. The new science major sequence will qualify graduates to work in the growth areas of geographic information systems and remote sensing. The courses are designed in such a way as to include spatial studies in a number of other areas like environmental management, resource exploration and emergency services where they are playing an increasingly important role.

Spatial Primer