Being a Licensed Land Surveyor

Picking a vocation or career is a major step in life. You usually spend a major portion of your waking life devoted to work. For some, work is a means of making money, so that they can enjoy the other few hours of their life, for some it is merely a means of survival.

For a select few, work is not only their livelihood, but it encompasses all that they love and so becomes something bigger. It’s not just where you spend your time making your ducats, so that you can do something else…it is a place you would spend the fleeting moments of your brief time here on earth, even if the ducats came from someplace else.

I bumped into the career of surveying, by chance, in college…just a class I took as part of my geography major. After dubbing around for a few years at various survival-oriented jobs, I got a job surveying with a local company in Keene. That opened my eyes to a new world!

Land surveying encompasses so much of what I love! I enjoy history, historical research, mathematics, puzzles, treasure hunts, detective work, snowshoeing, hiking, forest biology, being outside, computers, working with hand tools, measuring and figuring out stuff, new technology, art and drawing, and having a respectable and respected position in the community. I enjoy helping people and solving problems. I get to do all of this as a surveyor.

What other job can you spend the day hiking around in the woods on snowshoes, searching for elusive treasures, like an iron pipe or stone in the middle of some 200 acre tract (in the middle of no-where); use an axe or machete and plumb-bob to set up a network or trail through the forest, employ the use of robots, lasers, prisms, satellites and powerful hand-held computers to measure and calculate the position of the things you find; and then bring all that data into a computer and try to resolve what you have accurately measured and located, to what has been documented through the last 200 years+ of local history. You employ mathematics and legal principals to determine the positions of property corners, location of improvements, elevations and contours and the existing conditions on a piece of land. Then you get to use the computer to draft a plan showing your work that accurately records the measurements you took in a format that is to scale and yet also reflects some artistic and aesthetically pleasing qualities. In the end, the plan might be recorded at the registry of deeds, so that 100 years from now, someone might use my work and remember what I have done. A mark on posterity and my own piece of immortality.

And when work is slow…you blog about it. Ha ha