Students discover career opportunities through heritage surveying competition

Numerous groups of students assembled on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., USA, to conduct surveys of the surrounding area amidst the peak of this year's cherry blossom bloom. Among them, one particular team stood out due to their distinctive attire. Clad in white colonial wigs, wool vests, caps and sport jackets reminiscent of the 1910s, they exuded a captivating aura. Adding to their allure, these students wielded antique tools, peered through optical viewfinders mounted on wooden tripods, and employed metal chains to measure distances between different points.

Sometimes, to find the future you have to visit the past. In this case, the students with the vintage costumes were using old-school surveying tools to measure some of the capital’s oldest buildings as part of a competition jointly hosted by NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey and the National Society of Professional Surveyors. The organizers hope the students will become future surveyors.

"A lot of people think when you say you do surveying, you are a poll-taker, not a measurement professional," said Joe Fenicle, one of the competition’s faculty advisors. “We joke that surveying is a top-secret profession!”

Fenicle is an assistant professor at the University of Akron, and he has seen a huge demand for the work, and not enough people to get projects done as needed. “In the entire state of Michigan, for example, there are only seven professionals younger than 30,” he said.

Invisible infrastructure

Jacob Heck, a regional geodetic advisor at NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey and incoming president of the Young Surveyors Network, said he also recognizes the lack of a younger cohort. Few people know that surveyors are the professionals who work to make the precise measurements that determine property boundaries, and virtually no one knows about the career options in the closely related field of geodesy – the science of accurately measuring and understanding the Earth's geometric shape, orientation in space, and gravity field.

Many organizations use geodesy to map shorelines, determine land boundaries and improve transportation and navigation safety. NGS is the government agency responsible for maintaining a set of accurately measured points that form the American National Spatial Reference System, which allows different kinds of maps to be consistent with one another.

The numbers and measurements are essential to commerce and security, but remain unseen by most people. They are sometimes called the nation’s 'invisible infrastructure'. The lack of new practitioners in the field that builds that infrastructure and maintains it has been labelled a US national-level crisis.

Read the full NOAA story here