10 Header The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 46, No. 4 Member Spotlight When she would stumble across an anomaly, it gave her the opportunity to research the correct information. But, she also occasionally had to get help from a colleague named Dave. When Dave would give her a solution for a problem, she could repeat that solution for similar problems. But when she found a new problem, she would have to go to him for a new solution. Then, about a decade later, Dave saw Edith at a PLSO convention and they struck up a conversation. “He said to me, ‘Yeah, by the end of the summer, when I saw you coming back to By Vanessa Salvia Edith Forkner got started as a surveyor because she had gotten a math degree but didn’t know what to do with it. “Willamette University had a computer program where you could input various things about you, like your major, and it would spit out possible professions you might like to go into,” she says. Following a couple of statistician and actuarial jobs, number four on the list was always land surveying. Even though she liked geometry better than trigonometry, she thought they were pretty close and both at least a little fun. “I figured, I would be outside, I would be looking at historical documents, doing research, and so on, and I thought that sounded like fun,” so she went back to school and got herself another degree in surveying. For Edith, math skills were something that came naturally to her—she says she found it “very easy.” She did know what land surveying was before she saw it in the No. 4 position on her college’s list of professions, but only in “a vague sense.” “But it wasn’t something I’d ever thought about doing,” she says. Pretty much as soon as Edith decided to enter the world of surveying, she had the realization that it was something she would be happy to do as a career. “I knew right away that this worked for me,” she says. “I really enjoyed what I was doing and looked forward to making a career out of it. And there was nothing else that ever happened to change my mind about it.” Aside from the school projects she worked on, Edith got a summer job with Marion County. During her first summer there, they put her to work on their database, sorting out plats that were filed under large and small into a “medium” category and updating the database. “It was actually kind of fun, because I was also able to do some cleanup of the database during the process,” she says. “I would occasionally find two obviously different plats with the same number. Or I’d be looking at a plat and it wouldn’t appear to be in the database, because there was a typo in the number, or maybe there wasn’t a number at all, or something like that.” Edith Forkner, PLS North Bend, Oregon, BLM Coos Head (T. 26 S., R. 14 W., secs. 2 and 3). View of Coos Head (South Jetty) from the local S1/16.
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