Intern. Salary: $30,000 or less

You're an unpaid cartography intern with two unrelated part-time jobs. Every time you look in the mirror, you expect to see that your butt is missing because you've been working so hard.

First Job. Salary: $40,000

You just landed a job with the company who hosted your internship and you're super excited to get started, even if you still have that student debt hanging over your head. 

Seasoned Worker. Salary: $55,000

Field work is your jam at the moment. You're surveying sites left and right for large construction projects and road work. You're an expert at the new computer program your company uses, and you're teaching interns how to do what you do. You're so on the ball, you've even paid off your loans (phew).

Professional Surveyor. Salary: $60,000-$70,000

You're considered a professional at what you do. You now work for a big-time GIS firm and consistently do both field and computer work. In your spare time, you're working on an atlas for a big-time publishing company.

Cartographer Extraordinaire. Salary $70,000-$90,000

You're killin' it up at Google Maps. You spend your hours traveling the world as you provide images for Google, and you even have a side job as a for-hire professional cartographer. In your spare time, you create artistic maps to be hung on the walls of libraries and stuff.