Get to know Propeller’s world-class team in our ongoing employee spotlight. Today, we talk to Bea Gana, who serves as GIS specialist on the data success team. Bea is based in Manila, Philippines.
What do you do at Propeller?
As a GIS specialist, I process incoming survey imagery and ground control data from our customers. This means I’m also doing quality assurance, basically making sure the data lines up and looks legit. I’m one of the people customers talk to when they have problems. I explain survey issues, if there are any, and answer customer queries.
What’s your career background?
I graduated with a degree in geodetic engineering from the University of the Philippines. Right after that I became a licensed surveyor, but never practiced. I went straight into remote sensing—satellites, drones, and GIS stuff. Then I found Propeller, and it just lined up perfectly with my skills and interests.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Quezon City in Metro Manila. I’ve lived here my whole life—a city girl, through and through.
Before working at Propeller, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?
I had a short stint as a part-time copy editor for a sports website. It covered all sorts of local sports here in Manila, including collegiate leagues. So I was pretty up-to-date on all the obscure teams and schools.
What’s your favorite Propeller memory?
Our retreat to Thailand is tough to beat. I got to meet everyone from Propeller’s other offices.
By the time that retreat happened, I had been at Propeller for a couple of months, so it was the first time to meet the others in person. These were people I was talking to all the time on Slack or email or video chats. It was great to meet the rest of the team, too, who I didn’t work with as much. Getting the chance to meet and get to know people in person that you only work with remotely is really valuable.
Any talents, secret superpowers, or fun facts about yourself to share?
There’s a video game called Lumines and I’m pretty into it. I’m currently tied for 50th place in the world for high score. So I get to say I’m top 50 at something!
If you could be any piece of technology, what would you be and why?
Because of my remote sensing background, I do like satellites. Satellites are cool; they are always watching and gathering data. I’d want to be one of the imaging ones because you get pretty pictures. It’s kind of like being a drone—you get to see stuff from a cool angle, but even higher.
If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
That’s a hard question, but I think it would be cool if I had a superpower to learn languages on the fly. Like a polyglot on demand. It’d also be useful at work as well because then I could talk to any customer in their native language. And I do like to travel, so I could use it wherever I wanted to go.
Do you have an office nickname? If so, what is it and how did you get it?
Not really. I am just Bea, which I’m glad people can actually pronounce. The common way is to say it like “bee,” but it’s short for my full name, Beatriz, which pronounces the “a.”
What’s one thing you wish people understood better about Propeller?
I want people to know about, and take advantage of, our great customer success team more. They are a fantastic resource, and have all the know-how when it comes to conducting drone surveys and collecting the best data. They’re pretty much my team’s in-field counterparts.
One thing we all really enjoy helping customers with is understanding the best ways to collect their data. While we can do a lot of technical wizardry at Propeller on the data processing side, nothing makes for a better survey than clean data.
