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How or why did you become a surveyor?
Hollandbriscoe replied 5 years, 6 months ago 52 Members · 62 Replies
Some interesting stories from everyone.
In forestry school in 1961, where after 2 semester classes in surveying, and 1 in drafting, a friend (Ben Blackburn, 1980 President, Florida Surveying & Mapping Society) who had just got out of the Army hooked me up for summer work with Moorhead Engineering (oldest surveying company in Florida, opened 1884) in Ocala, Florida, where he had just started. I basically started out day one as a 19 year old PC since I had the ability to draw, make proper field notes, could calculate, run levels and transits, etc. Strange how everything just fell into place…I needed to earn some money ($40/week), and my friend was beginning to “benefit” from his Army surveying training.
While in college worked part time at Moorhead until 1963, when I moved to Rome, Georgia, for a job with Georgia Kraft Company as a forester. In 1965, the old Forest Engineer was promoted to a Department head, and the Forest Engineer position came open. I was no where near in line for this position due to age/experience/knowledge, but after a company wide search failed to turn up a “suitable” candidate, the human resources manager had recalled an interview with a new guy who had done some work with an engineering & surveying company while in college. Without my awareness a call was made to Ocala, and after a talk with Moorhead’s Manager, Gene Stanaland, P.E., the decision was basically made to transfer me to corporate headquarters and give me the job…with conditions. The major condition being that I could become a licensed surveyor in both Alabama and Georgia within 6 years, and would continue course work toward becoming a P.E. At the age of 23, I was likely the youngest Forest Engineer in the country, held no state licenses, and becoming involved in surveying once again without being able to benefit with having someone to show me the ropes. However, they made me responsible (scary, I know) for all building, ferry landings, rail sidings and road construction, and boundaries, among a myriad other things I had to get up to speed on for Georgia Kraft’s 2 million acre forest lands scattered across Northern Alabama and Northern Georgia. Also, had to appear with company lawyers for all boundary litigation matters. Actually got to meet with Walt Robilard when he was Southeastern Regional Director for USFS, for paper company land exchanges with the USFS. Eventually obtained surveying licenses in Alabama and Georgia in 1971, and in Florida in 1972. Within days of receiving my Florida license got a call from Ben Blackburn wanting me to go in with him, and together we opened a new survey office in the Orlando area.
As with the majority here, becoming a surveyor was not a planned career, but it has been very rewarding. Also, both sons are PSMs and a grandson will be completing a Geomatics degree soon.
Back 40 years ago I probably knew three or four of those Ag Engineering profs teaching your Ag Mech classes. Drove around the UT campus after dark on July 3, 1977 on the way home from a week at NCSU for the summer meeting. Never found an empty motel room anywhere. Gave up and slept in the car near the big city of Jellico. Checked into the only empty room in some motel in Lexington about noon and went straight to bed.
Fall of 1997, I had wrapped up an adventure tourism degree, internship, and a summers worth or mountain guiding work and needed to pay off my student loans.
Ended up doing seismic surveying that winter for Enertec, in the Alberta mountains and was envious of the surveyors. Getting paid to be an advance team for layout crews in the mountains sounded like good work to me.
The following summer, guiding work was non-existent, so I headed back up north to the oil patch and tried to get on a pipeline welding crew. After working a couple days a week for a few weeks, I was struggling to make ends meet, living in my van in -40c and not making the money I had hoped in the oil patch.
Complaining to my mom on the phone about my situation, I thought back to the seismic surveyors, and mentioned I might try survey school. She told me that why not see if I can try it without school and see if I like it first. That afternoon I walked into my first survey office and was promised a job in a weeks time.
Tried it, loved it, and have never looked back.
I went to college with the intention of becoming a trial lawyer, so I majored in Speech. But after a year or so I had to pick up other courses in other departments and I started taking courses in geography which I enjoyed. I was always good at geography and geometry classes. So I started drifting toward Geography and I was less interested in Speech or the Law. When I graduated it was the President Ford recession so there weren’t many jobs about and I started substitute teaching and bar tending. But after a year or so I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life so I started calling around local survey shops and I got a job as a rodman and here I am 41 years later. Registered in two states, used to be three.
I had a drug problem. Dad drug me to work off the bus, on saturdays…. oh I hated surveying. Was turning angles on a vernier transit at 13.Stayed far away for two years, yeah right. Still helping survey on Saturdays for extra cash. One day it took.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to loseWent to college to be a shop teacher. After graduation I worked in a wood shop making pallets and wood stakes. The company was in the red most of the time so I kept my eyes open and answered an ad for a draftsman, I had taken every drafting course that I could in college. It turned out to be as a crew chief for the county surveyor, within a week, I was running the total station and directing the rod man. I worked there for 14 years and managed to become licensed. With a change in bosses I went down the road to several different jobs. I tried my hand at GIS for seven years, tied to a desk about drove me crazy. That job ended(not by my choice, budget cuts) and in order to support myself I found a company that needed a licensed surveyor. 4 years later and three more state licenses I am still here and cannot figure for the life of me how I sat at a desk in front of a computer for seven years.
I took industrial arts/woodshop in high school, which included hand drafting. I was working at the local pizza place, and met a guy that was a supervisor at a wiring harness company next to the high school. The engineer needed some help, and since I had the basics of drafting, I got the job. I left there and worked for a computer company that repaired electronics for FedEx, and got laid off from there and worked running prints in a house designer’s firm. I got to do a little drafting there.
There was a local engineering/land surveying firm in my hometown, and I kept bugging him for about a year and a half to hire me as a draftsman. He finally did, after he knew he could keep me busy, and I ended up changing my AAS program from mechanical/industrial engineering technology to civil/construction engineering technology. I learned so much over the next 6 years, and when things slowed down in the summer/fall of 2000, I went to work for another firm. Got my TN and AR license there, and after 18 months, I had an opportunity to take a position with another firm and learn robotics and GPS. I got my MS license while working here, and learned a lot more. I did a lot of traveling, and with a wife and three small kids at home, I need to be home more. I went back to work for the first firm I worked for, with the intention of buying into the company when one of the owners retired. The one owner never retired, as his plans changed.
I decided it was time for me to do my own thing, and I started my own firm in July 2007. I did anything and everything, and gained so much more knowledge and experience, it was amazing. It was the toughest 8 years of my life, and I gained two more licenses during this time period (MO and KY).
I merged with a larger firm in October 2015, before a good friend and founding partner of the firm started planning his retirement. I wrapped up the few ongoing projects I had over the next few months. I am now a partner here. It is a great firm with a good, capable staff, and I am very happy here. I’ve been doing this 23 years, and cannot imagine myself doing anything else.
Went to Paul Smith’s College for forestry and had to take a survey course and got hooked. Stayed for an extra year to get my associate degree in surveying. Graduated then worked for two years at a local survey firm. Then attended UMaine to get a bachelor degree in Surveying Engineering.
Just out of high school in 1975 I enrolled in the forest technology program at Central Oregon Community College. I had no idea what forestry was all about?? turns out it??s about large scale crop cultivation. I was somewhat disillusioned but I stuck with it and really enjoyed the survey classes we had every other term. That first summer (1976) I got a summer job with the USFS on a ??P-line? road survey crew up in the Ochoco Mountains and had the time of my life. After graduating from college I was rehired by the USFS for another summer, quit to take a job with a surveying/engineering firm, and so on to this job 41 years later. The only ??forestry? work I??ve ever done was during layoffs in the early 1980s. Tree planting crews and, once, a gopher killing crew. I figure these two forestry jobs gave me skills I can fall back on if this surveying gig doesn??t pan out.
- Posted by: jim.cox
Straight out of school, working forestry on our West Coast, got allocated to a survey crew…
Same story here. Degree in Forestry. Went to work for the State Forestry department and put on survey crew. 1978
I thought I wanted to be an architect when I was in high school, so I took every drafting class available. Before I graduated HS in 1977, I started as a draftsman at a small engineering/surveying company with a little help from our neighbor, who was their only PLS. Worked that summer as a draftsman “slinging ink”, but did get grabbed to go in the field a couple of times on a leveling crew. Went off to college and they hired me back when I came home the next summer. I started to get more field time, mostly as a pack mule. Didn’t go back to college that fall so they kept me on full time. The following summer they were getting ready to start a USFS cadastral job in the Stanislaus National Forest. By then I could set up tripods, give and take line, and head chain, but had no clue how to run that mystical instrument. A few days before the contract was to start, our only PC was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. The following day I went from grunt to Party Chief. The PLS took me and his teenage son to the mountains the following Monday, where we set up camp for the summer. We spent the next 4 days doing recon of PLSS corners, then he taught me how to turn angles on the Kern theodolite, and how to measure distances with the HP3805, keeping notes in accordance with the contract specs, in the evenings using a traverse loop we set up around camp. Me and his son, who I grew up with, spent the next 7 weeks having a blast in the forest and did an amazing amount of work considering that between us, we knew almost nothing about field surveying, except what we learned that first week.
I went back to college that fall, but whenever money got tight, I could always find work at a local firm, having both office and field skills. Got married in 1982 and moved to Sacramento for my bride to go to college. Got a job within 3 days using the “help wanted” section of the local paper. In the first week my PC asked me if I had my LSIT and I didn’t even know what it was. He brought me the exam application the following day, and taught me a heck of a lot during the next 18 months. Passed the LSIT, then took the California State Specific exam in 1985 at the age of 26. Didn’t pass, but failed by less than 10 points. Passed the following year. Then I decided I wanted to go back to engineering school since my wife had graduated. Worked part time while going to school. Was a semester from finishing my civil degree at Sac State when my wife, soon to be ex-wife, decided the grass look greener with an oral surgeon she worked for. I quit school out of necessity because she was my scholarship, and went to work full time. Been at it ever since. Worked in the private sector 5 more years, then jumped to the State. Rose to management in 2003, where I did zero surveying. Did that until 2012, then made a job change before it killed me. Best decision I ever made. I LOVE my job now!!!
Well, maybe the second best decision I ever made, after not becoming an engineer. I can speak their language, but I would have hated the work.
Great stories on this thread.
@Holy Cow
One I remember as a favorite, because I worked for him when he was doing his research project for his doctorate was Fred Tompkins. He wasn’t much older than me and was a great guy. I think he later became head of the Ag Engineering department. Dr. Bobby Bledsoe was the professor that I did my senior project under. I believe he died a few years ago. Professor Curtis Shelton taught the Soil and Water Conservation Engineering courses I took that sort of led me to land surveying in a round about way. There are other names I could probably dredge up but it has been about 45 years since I graduated.
I was walking home from my girl friend’s house one Sunday when the company owner (a friend of my sister and one of my friends) asked if I needed a job. I had three, bar tending and such, said sure. Started then next day. That was 41 years ago. Never looked back. Still tended bar for a while though, the side benefits were kinda good.
MikeI liked maps. To be honest when I signed up for the uni degree, I really had no idea what a surveyor did but it was something with maps so that was ok.
20 years later I haven’t regretted it at all.
Enlisted in the Marine Corps.
0261 Topographic Intelligence Specialist
- Posted by: Firestix
Enlisted in the Marine Corps.
0261 Topographic Intelligence Specialist
Back in the middle 70’s I hired a guy fresh out of the Army that had been with an artillery brigade at Ft. Sill, mos 82C if I remember right. He had a hard time with the civilian side of things at first. Then he found a Wild T2 in a closet that none of us would mess with because it had the inverted image. He loved it. Turned out to be one of the best gunners I ever had. However I really got tired of listening to him ramble on about how much easier grads and mils were over degrees, minutes and seconds…. ?
Arty used the grads and mil but we never messed with them. It was always DMS for us. But that T2, yeah that thing was awesome! Along with the T3 and T16.
@Paden Cash
Col. Hendrix, my survey professor at TJC spent his summers teaching artillary techniquies at Fort Sill.
He entered the service and was issued a horse in addition to the normal supplies soldiers take care of.
They pulled cannons and whatever with horses and blasted at rocks.
- Posted by: A Harris
@Paden Cash
Col. Hendrix, my survey professor at TJC spent his summers teaching artillary techniquies at Fort Sill.
He entered the service and was issued a horse in addition to the normal supplies soldiers take care of.
They pulled cannons and whatever with horses and blasted at rocks.
Issued a HORSE!?? How old is that dude?
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