Kim Hamer Hulse '84

Kim has worked at the National Geographic Society for the past 30 years  —where she is currently the Vice President of Education.

Although she believes she could not have predicted that she would have landed in the world of formal education, she absolutely wanted to have a career that used her Geography degree—and I found it!   Kim was recruited to work at National Geographic in 1988, when they were just starting an education outreach program meant to restore the teaching and learning of geography back into the nation’s schools.  As the program developed and grew, and education policy did its pendulum arc from emphasizing reading and math to a focus on STEM, our mission became one of infusing geographic concepts and skills into the K-12 curriculum overall.

Every day she goes to work to fulfill this mission: To teach kids about the world and how it works, so they can succeed and make it a better place.  We do our work largely through making resources for use in the classroom, and providing professional development for teachers on how best to use these resources to change the way they teach their students about the interconnectedness of the world’s systems, and their place in it.

In her time here, she's had the pleasure of overseeing interns from Geography programs in universities all over the US—including several from Dartmouth.

A few of them even stayed on to work with us, in the cartography department, or with our science and exploration team.

Her degree in Geography, with the Environmental Studies certificate, seems to have had an influence on her sons as well. Her oldest is a 2016 Geography major from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and youngest just completed his Junior year at the University of Vermont, where he is pursuing a B.S. in Environmental Science.