Land Surveyor

Do you like trigonometry? How about astronomy? Do you like to solve mysteries? Do you like spending time in the outdoors and visiting remote areas? Is researching old records and meeting with land owners interesting to you? Surveying the boundaries of the public lands is a combination of all these things. It is part mathematical, part legal, part records searching, part public relations, and lots of hard physical work. As a BLM surveyor, you may be called to go to Washington, D.C., to search archives for 100-year-old documents, or you may have to camp out on the Salmon River and search for old stone monuments that were first set in the 1870s. Or you may spend days at the law library researching case law in order to decide the proper way to determine a specific boundary problem. Surveyors observe the stars to find direction, and use satellites to obtain the positions of points on the ground. To prepare in high school, take all the math, English, and computer science classes you can. Other helpful classes are botany, soils, geology, astronomy and speech. In college, you should plan on getting a bachelor's degree in civil engineering (with a surveying emphasis) or a degree in surveying from a college certified by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET).