Category Archives: Surveying
How Did I Ever Get Into this Profession?
Finding My Boundaries My first job in surveying came by accident, or perhaps part of a grand plan from God that I didn’t expect. I was only 17 years old and I had dropped out of art school after just one semester of failing grades. I had tried art school simply because it seemed easier...
Refining Measurement
A land surveyor unpacks the concept of accuracy “Accuracy is addictive,” my friend David Doyle once said. Doyle is a geodesist by trade. For someone in his line of work, this addiction has a rich tradition. Geodesy is the study of Earth’s shape, rotation, and gravity field. The discipline involves an eternal quest to refine...
The Challenge of Channeling Water
From the Romans to the Everglades, the art of directing water flow has never been easy For thousands of years impromptu land surveyors tried, sometimes successfully, to force water to flow in a direction it did not want to go. This was done to help grow crops in areas where water was not abundant enough...
Surveyor’s Corner: Women in Surveying
The future for women in surveying is getting brighter all the time History tells us the journey for female surveyors began with Alice Fletcher in the late 1800s. Fletcher was a social scientist who tried to integrate Native Americans into the European culture spreading across America. After learning that Native Americans feared being banished to...
The Fangs and the Damage Done
By Cooper Ferko Introduction: Surveyors encounter dangerous situations in the field, and this includes wildlife. We’ve all had our snake encounters, venomous and non. There was a time when I was cavalier about it, flicking a snake away with a range pole. But that all changed around a campfire, at my cousin’s family camp near...
Surveyors and Appellate Court Opinions
Why should we care about appellate court opinions? I have had this question posed to me on numerous occasions. I suppose it has its roots in the old surveyor’s saw: “We don’t need to read court decisions, because you can never know what the judge is going to do.” While this may have a grain...
