Starting school next week. Any advice?

The entire curriculum will likely require more hours of out-of class study than seems reasonable!

The math and science requisites are focused classes in which you need to keep up to keep from falling behind, much less excel. Speeding trains all. But there is a surveying use for everything you must learn. What's the area of this parcel with the curved boundary? How to apply geometric strength of figure to promote the tightest unconstrained adjustments of your GNSS control survey observations?

First semester GIS is fun, second semester and beyond is more mathy, as maps are made from tables, and tables are sets, and those sets live on databases, which live on file systems on computers, which all have rules and limits...Remote sensing is applied physics.

CAD skills are as important as field skills. High drafting skills will set you apart from the next guy, so some schools make that their "stamp" on a graduate. Be prepared to deep dive into a vastly powerful and vastly complex piece of software that's easy to make mistakes on, and which often brings up questions that nothing but pure surveying knowledge and experience can solve.

Which is to say nothing of efficient field practice, which is a bit like efficient handling of a ship, or a team of horses and a tippy wagon on a tight schedule - there's a lot going on there. And remember, the sort of "farm boy" mechanical and people sense that it takes to perform field surveying evolutions and not get the truck stuck on a Friday is the same sort of "common sense" that Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore brought to their rather successful practice and management of semiconductor, component, and integrated circuit design.

On top of all this STEM shit, when you go to work for $$, two companies across town from each other may be more different in the way they do things than two companies across the country from each other. Expect that, and come prepared to do things the way the person who pays you wants you to do them. ;)

/r/Surveying Thread