25 Header Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Member Spotlight By Vanessa Salvia For Jesse White, the path to a career in surveying was an unexpected one, but it has taken him on a remarkable journey around the globe. Initially set on becoming an architect, a chance encounter with a surveyor at a golf course construction site opened his eyes to the profession during the summer before college. Throughout high school, White always knew that he liked design and infrastructure. Even as a kid, the things he liked to draw were cityscapes. Architecture seemed like a natural fit, even though he didn’t have any architecture role models in his life. After graduating from high school at age 17—“Too young to know what I wanted to do with my adult life,” he says—he worked with his grandfather building a new golf course in Moorpark, California, the summer before going to college. “I didn’t know what he was doing and it stood out to me,” says White, “so I stopped and asked him some questions. This guy took all the time in the world to just sit down and answer some kid‘s questions about what surveying is and what he was doing.” That conversation planted the seed, but it wasn‘t until after his first semester of architecture studies that White realized his true calling was elsewhere. “I still don‘t understand anything about drawing, I have no artistic talent,” he says of his realization. “But I do like numbers, and I had a life decision to make about continuing on with college on the path I was on or making a change.” An old friend‘s tales of the Navy Seabees land surveying and construction roles convinced White to shift gears. He joined Jesse White, PLS 360landsurv.com Horseback exploration to locate GLO and BLM monuments on a private boundary survey in Alfalfa, Oregon. the Navy and spent four years as an engineering aide, leading the surveying department in his battalion. After leaving the military, White‘s surveying career took him across the country, from Northern California to Mississippi to Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Oregon. Along the way, he gained diverse experience surveying vertical structures up to 300 feet high, radio towers, wind farms, and even the interior of a dam. “We were redesigning the dam to create backflow baffles or security baffles in between the bays,” White explains. “So that way, if the face of the dam that was holding the water ever failed, these baffles or secondary walls would catch the water and potentially either stop it or slow it down from taking down the whole dam.” White always felt driven to obtain his professional licensure. continues
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