9 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Featured Article HOW DID YOU BECOME A LAND SURVEYOR? During the conference earlier this year, we asked attendees the question about how they became a land surveyor. The answers, as we expected, were varied. This provides real evidence that surveyors become surveyors with a wide variety of experiences and backgrounds, and if we are to attract new surveyors to the profession, we need to cast a wide net to attract people from fields where you might not expect surveyors to come from. We hope you enjoy this round up of how we became surveyors. And if you didn’t participate in this informal poll, drop us a line and let us know how you became a land surveyor. Delenora Grey, PLS After a college degree in geology and a miserable experience as a first-year teacher in Hawaii, I found a 3-week course in field volcanology at UH-Hilo. One aspect was volcano deformation monitoring. We ran levels with 3-meter invar rods, shot EDMs, and set up tripods for GPS. I decided this was what I wanted to do, so I signed up for an MS program in volcanology at UA-Fairbanks, only to find out most volcanoes are monitored by satellite imagery, not on the ground. Meanwhile, I ran into students on campus with a total station on a tripod and asked how they got to do that, since it’s what I thought I’d signed up for. That led to my first two surveying classes (but not a changed major), followed several years later by an internship and AAS degree in geomatics that led to jobs as a surveyor and eventually to licensure. I still aspire to apply the boundary law principles we learn about at these conferences to real scenarios in the field. Joshua Evey, PLS In high school I had a teacher who told me engineering would be a tough degree to get and that I probably couldn’t do it, I wasn’t disciplined enough. I guess the best way to motivate me is to tell me I can’t do something. In college we were taught surveying and I was hooked on my first traverse with a staff compass and chain. After graduating from OSU, the job market for forest engineering tanked. My first boss started his own surveying business out of taking a reduction in force payout from an engineering job, so I joined him. I became a surveyor and have not looked back. Jason Martin, PLS I started off college as a civil major. The summer after my first year of college, I got a job surveying. I had such a great summer, I went back the next year and changed my major to surveying. I’ve never looked back! Michelle McBride, PLS I decided to go to college when the economy sank in the mid-2000s. I tossed out the medical half of Oregon Institute of Technology’s curriculum guide, reviewed continues
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