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How or why did you become a surveyor?
Posted by herbert on September 18, 2018 at 12:13 amSo I was talking to a young person at a school fair about becoming a surveyor… they said “I didn’t even know it was a thing”. That got me thinking… I became interested in surveying when our neighbor had a survey. I talked with the guy and actually got a job with him later on… until then, I too “didn’t know it was a thing”. How did you all become surveyors?
Hollandbriscoe replied 5 years, 6 months ago 52 Members · 62 Replies- 62 Replies
Wanted to be a geologist. Went to a good school that only had geological engineering not just a geology degree. Succeeded in geology courses, failed miserably at calculus and calculus based engineering courses. Many times on academic probation, finally switched and grad with honors with an AAS GIS GPS. Chased down survey jobs, 17 years in. Now make 1/3rd as much as a geologic eng would.
I could say it was a moment of insanity.
It was a rather circuitous route after 7 12 years in the Navy and another year working as defense contractor I convinced myself that I was tired of turning wenches on F18’s, F14’s and going to sea. I knew I wanted my own business but had no clue. So I took some aptitude tests and guess what…..surveying was one of the options.
It was then I started seeing surveyors everywhere. I made some visits (cold calls) to local surveyors where I was at the time in Maryland and talked to them.
Saw an ad in Backpacker magazine for a Associate Degree in Surveying & Mapping at what was Denver Institute of Technology so I packed my truck and headed for Denver. Hated that miserable wretched place but I finished and pointed my truck back to Georgia and here I be.
I still have my FAA Mechanics License and 2 classes short of another Associate Degree from Embry Riddle & changing careers was a foolish thing to do as I had to start out at the bottom in a career that undervalues itself.
But at least I have not had to follow through on my threat to take my clothes off for money……………yet.
I owed my roommate who was an I man at a local NOVA firm 50$.
He took me out in the field and I cut line all day on a Saturday.
I was hooked ever sense.
Legacy here. Pops was a land surveyor…and I was his “dropout” son. Took me a few years to swallow the “doin’ what your dad did” pill, but it’s all been well worth it.
Engineering graduate doing whatever needed done to complete the projects our little consulting firm had taken on. After obtaining my P.E. a few simple boundary survey projects came along. Went out on my own. Never looked back. Have the L.S., as well, BTW.
- Posted by: Just A. Surveyor
Saw an ad in Backpacker magazine for a Associate Degree in Surveying & Mapping at what was Denver Institute of Technology so I packed my truck and headed for Denver. Hated that miserable wretched place but I finished and pointed my truck back to Georgia and here I be.
Colorado thanks you for leaving that miserable place!
My dad was a draftsman for a local engineering and surveying company. I did not want to go to college and they had an opening on the field crew. 20 years later still enjoying it.
Not a surveyor but ended up in the geodetic science dept at Ohio State after seeing an ad for the department in the university newspaper, The Lantern. The ad listed the 4 graduate degree concentrations: geodesy, photogrammetry, computer mapping, and LIS. I thought they all sounded interesting, particularly the computer mapping. It also said you only needed a STEM degree to apply. That would have been 1990, and I applied in 1991 and started that fall. In winter 1994, went to GIS/LIS conference in Minneapolis, talked to some Esri people who said to contact them when I graduated. I finished in March, interviewed on Good Friday and started in early May. The real reason they hired me is that I understood map projections and got on with the two guys who were currently handling them. The one who I ended up replacing was really a raster analysis guy at heart.
I’m just one of those evil GIS people. Bwah-hah-hah! Seriously, I do coordinate systems and transformations at Esri.in another thread a few weeks back i mentioned a boss who kept bouncing paychecks and driving off in her new mercedes sedan. that was a sign shop. i loved that job. but i was broke, i was 26 or 27, and the sign business around here evidently wasn’t desperate for its next savant (how many neon sign restoration/fabrication savants there are in the world is likely a prime number. a small prime number.).
i was renting the house next door to where i sit right now. next door to that i had a neighbor who had just gotten his surveying license. i didn’t even know what that meant. alls i knew was he could play a mean guitar and he was usually the one twisting up stuff in paper when it came time for the afternoon front yard jam. ’bout a week after i pawned the welder from the sign shop and was rather plainly asked not to return to my place of volunteerism, i mentioned to my neighbor that my cerveza-y-mota funds were getting light enough to blow away in a weak breeze. he’d just quit his job to go it alone, and asked me if i’d be interested in helping him until he could find somebody more permanent-like. it occurred to me at that very moment that i didn’t even know what the hell he did for a living. but the promise of 12 bones an hour cash rendered that ignorance irrelevant.
next afternoon (on a sunday, no less), we rolled out in his old chevy van (with cragars and a 3-on-the-tree) to shoot some house lot in the burbs. i might as well have been carrying around an MRI machine for all i knew. and here- right here- is why i’m a surveyor today: i couldn’t hop the fence. now look- i grew up playing soccer, surfing, riding bmx, skateboarding, motocross, whatever. but at 26 years old i watched a 40 year old man go over a 6-foot picket fence like it was his part of his warmup routine, and the sense of shame i felt at that instant will outlast the whole fukushima fiasco.
obviously there are myriad more reasons why i’m still doing this 20+ years later. but i ain’t gonna lie- it was proving that my (at the time) pudgy, pear-shaped ass could indeed get over a picket fence.
oh- and that neighbor: still my neighbor. and, along with my old dog, the other best buddy i’ll ever have in this life. two RPLS living two houses apart. i worked for him for five years, figured we’d probably pressed our luck on the whole friend/business deal. now i hire him out here and there, he throws me work he doesn’t want to tackle (now that he’s occasionally mentioning the “R” word…). we’ve raised each other’s kids, cried over dead friends, flagged one buddy’s hearse, you get the drift.
hell, if he’d been a plumber i might be a plumber right now.
- Posted by: Cameron Watson PLSPosted by: Just A. Surveyor
Saw an ad in Backpacker magazine for a Associate Degree in Surveying & Mapping at what was Denver Institute of Technology so I packed my truck and headed for Denver. Hated that miserable wretched place but I finished and pointed my truck back to Georgia and here I be.
Colorado thanks you for leaving that miserable place.
Pull the knot out of your panties. I had no problem with Colorado however Denver sucked.
9th grade shop class. Our teacher took some of outside to do a little topographic survey of the area in back of the school. The school had just opened that fall (1971) and he wanted an “as-built” of the yard in back of the shop.
I became very interested in the profession and the more that I looked into it the more I liked.
Don
is that why it’s so windy in CO?
Got hired by a local instrument dealer because I had an electronics background and knew how to use a PC. Worked on that side of the fence for 22+ years, then moved into actual surveying about five years ago. I won’t be getting licensed but we have no shortage of stamps around here.
I was working at Radio Shack & sold some 2-way radios to some guy. As you may remember, Radio Shack forced us salesman to interview you, get your address, blood type, favorite color, all that stuff. I found out he was the guy that surveyed my grandmother’s estate. I knew computers & hated my job… the rest is history, ancient history!
Bounced around a couple of jobs after college. Worked as a technical writer for a defense contractor for a while in Seattle (easy to get, father was the VP) then moved back to DC where I had grown up and worked here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Conservative_Political_Action_Committee
and here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Research_Center
Also wrangled my way into a State Department internship at the US Embassy in London because I was dating a young lass in the Reagan Administration that worked in the political appointments office.
Around age 25 I decided that telling lies for money was no way to make a living so I quit and was looking for a job in the help wanted section of the Washington Post. Greenhorne & O’Mara (now part of Stantec) had an ad for entry level survey field staff…no experience. All I knew about surveying was that Thoreau was a surveyor (I was an English major), but my rent was due and I was close to living on free happy hour bar food, so I applied. @luke-co-pls hired me and the rest, as they say, is history
I was taking a six month cruise courtesy of Uncle Sam off the coast of Egypt and hadn’t seen a tree or a blue eyed girl for a very long time. I was in the lengthy process of purchasing a farm up against the Daniel Boone National Forest. My mom handled all the details including ordering a survey, done by James Meredith, PLS. The plat came via a helicopter mail run one day and I opened up the rest of my life. This map shows the property line running up a creek to a notch on a rock, then up to a ridge, along a cliff. to a set iron pin witnessed by a triple black oak bearing xxxx and a pin oak bearing xxxx and a ……. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen! The guy knew his trees, and he blazed and painted the whole perimeter. It is still one of the best surveys I have ever seen. My six year enlistment was coming up and I knew electronics was not what I wanted to keep doing, too much indoor time and this seemed like the best job in the world.
I was mustered out at Christmas and went to the admissions department at the University of Kentucky early January and said, “I want to be a surveyor. What classes do I need to take? I think it has a lot to do with trees”. So the admissions lady knowing as much as I did about surveying put me in the College of Agriculture. Whenever I needed to do anything with my records after that I had to trudge all the way across campus to the Ag side, being the only College of Engineering student that was too ignorant to enroll in the right department.
Many years later(about 20), I met a retired surveyor who came up under the tutelage of James Meredith and introduced me at a conference to the man who so profoundly changed my life and never knew it.
Whilst on a glaciology expedition it was decided that because of my size I would be able to hump a T-2 around the ice for a summer. I liked it so when I got back to school I signed up for a couple of years of upper division surveying through the engineering department. Thus a surveyor was born.
My father being a surveyor always had some “side work” going on during the weekends. Being about 10 years old and his youngest I found most of my weekends were spent as an unpaid indentured servant holding down the south end of the chain.
I have always had a keen interest in astronomy. I asked Pops if I could look at the stars with his K&E. Pops wouldn’t let me fool with the instrument unless I could set it up over a point, leveled with the circle zeroed and the bottom motion free. I was an accomplished instrument man by the age of 12.
I tell people I’ve understood degrees, minutes and seconds since I was born. ?
Dad was a surveyor with the USFS and surveyed timber and fire roads in the summers. He took me with him to the field every summer for about 5 years. In the winter he designed improvements on the roads he’d surveyed in the summer. He would occasionally take me to the office. I loved the T-square, templates, Monroe calculators and 12-place book of tables. I learned what these cosine and tangent things were all about at a very early age. In high school I couldn’t understand why they were teaching geometry and trig – I thought everyone understood it like I did. I found out quickly that a lot of the cute girls didn’t understand it and needed tutoring. For a few years I was able to exchange my knowledge for theirs – what a great thing for a really nerdy kid! After high school I couldn’t get in the Navy because I am color blind, so I attended DeVry for three quarters and discovered that electronics was not for me either. I hung out doing nothing after that for about 6 months and Dad told me that if I was going to live there I had to have a job. I had washed dishes and bused tables for a while, and that didn’t seem like a career. I saw an ad in the paper from an engineering firm, so I got a haircut and went and applied for a surveyor job. They hired me the next day, and I’ve never looked back. I told my boss at the second engineering firm that I was going back to college some day, but never made any plans. late one July he said “Jim, are you going back to school this fall.” I hadn’t considered it at all, but blurted out “Yep!” I went to registration, didn’t know what to major in, and was randomly assigned an advisor. He asked me if I was interested in biology. I said (truthfully) that I was – my Boy Scout Troop leader was a biology professor, and he had taught us some very cool stuff. I wound up majoring in Aquatic Biology – which proved to be a fascinating blend of biology, physics and chemistry. When I was a sophomore I realized that I only need two additional chemistry classes to have a second major, so I did that too. During my entire college career I worked approx. 20 hrs/week, and was a crew chief on a half time survey crew. When I was preparing to graduate my boss approached me and said “Are you going to leave us when you graduate?” I told him that I was considering a job with the State Game & Fish, whereupon he offered me about 40% more than I was making (about 50% more than G&F was offering.) I accepted and have worked all but 1 week (which I intentionally took off) in the following 45+ years. Surveying is what I was born to do and I am profoundly thankful I made it my career. When I was a kid hanging out with Dad I would never have dreamed that it was what I was going to do… fortunately he got to see me become successful, and although we never talked about it, I’m sure he was proud about the way he shaped my professional life.
@ foggyidea
Our math teacher held a class outside to show how math can be important to determine a location for a new auditorium.
It all made sense and was just natural and fit my lifestyle of being outdoors and off the well beaten path.
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