
As workloads increase and as technology advances, I have noticed a disturbing trend in our profession: a lack of training and mentorship that was readily available when I first started land surveying. As a green hand, I remember my boss writing up trigonometry problems on a legal pad for me and then sending me home to solve horizontal and vertical curves. Long before he would let me learn any COGO programs (such as those on the HP 41 with Survey Pac), I remember thinking that this mentoring must be a standard in our profession. I was very thankful for his teaching. Now, years later, I realize that the teaching I received as a surveyor-in-training does not happen very often and ask myself, “What can I do to change this trend?”