When the XXIV FIG Congress hits town Sydney will be awash with surveyors. It’s an opportunity to highlight what a great career surveying can be. Surveying has many more possibilities and is far more wide reaching than most people imagine.
My own background included the best part of 40 years in education and over 20 years on the Board of Surveyors of NSW. Over the last 10 years, and especially since I “retired”, my time spent on practical surveying has been divided between forensic criminal and archaeological work. I help police detectives with crime scene measurements, including cold cases to discover new measurements which weren’t taken at the time of the original investigation but now could be important and can be seen on old photographs or video. Archaeologists need help with excavation sites and I also help to document aboriginal rock art.
Surveying has just kept getting more and more enjoyable over the time I have been working in the field, and it will continue to do so. New technologies mean we are no longer slaves to our old measuring tools. We now have much more time to do the fun stuff and really apply our skills to real-life scenarios.
Surveyors are really skilled at making 3D measurements. Traditionally that’s been applied to land management but the same skill set can be transferred to work out sequences of events or sizes of all sorts of things.
Surveyors don’t just collect data, there’s a whole bunch of investigative work (or “value adding” as they like to call it these days) turning that data in to knowledge.
Crime scene investigators may call in surveyor when they need to clarify what the exact location of something was in a photo that that was taken many years ago. With a background as a surveyor making maps from photos, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to start looking at CCTV cameras and working out how tall are the suspects.
On an archaeological dig things come out of a hole in the ground layer by layer and you have to be able to retrospectively place things back the way they came out to understand how they relate to one another. One particularly fascinating job was helping archaeologists on a dig where they had discovered the bones of mega-fauna (huge marsupials that roamed Australia after the age of the dinosaurs and up to 25 000 years ago). By applying surveying skills, the positioning of the bones helped them work out how the ancient creatures had met their demise.
One day I got a call from somebody in a fine art department at a major university. They’d discovered some ancient Aboriginal rock art they needed to catalogue. It was very precious and couldn’t be touched. Surveying the rock art by a series of overlapping photographs isn’t so different to the process of aerial map-making; and so began another chapter of my career.
In 10 years time surveyors, like everyone else, will be doing jobs no-one’s thought of yet. But it is already apparent that there will be so many avenues for people who develop 3D skills to work with the new applications that are bound to come along. People already want 3D TV and 3D movies. As 3D technologies increase in popularity professionals with that skill set will increasingly be in huge demand.
People considering surveying as a career need to have some mathematics in their background, but they certainly don’t need to have come top of the class. What they must have is a willingness to understand maths and apply it. For the most part surveying is an applied science rather than solving abstract mathematical problems. Most problems encountered can be boiled down to basic shapes and lengths, and with training you become adept at recognising these things and applying them.
To enjoy surveying you need to be a practical person who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty; whether in the office building 3D models for architects or out in the field working with police, archaeologists or many of the other professions who may call upon your skills.
As a surveyor you can become a vital cog in getting a lot of interesting and important things done.
John Fryer is an Emeritus Professor from the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, previously having held positions as Professor of Photogrammetry, and Head of Engineering. He has published over 200 scientific papers, conference proceedings, chapters in books and co-authored text-books on Surveying and Photogrammetry. He is a Fellow of the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute of Australia and member of several learned societies. John has had over 25 years of involvement with the Board of Surveyors of New South Wales as a member, examiner and advisor since 1982. He retired at the end of 2004 and has been active in consultancy work since that time. Most consultancies have involved forensic investigations for the police force where imagery and measurement problems were involved.
