CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED The California Surveyor ... - CLSA

California’s Only Female County Surveyor
By: Gwendolyn Gee, PLS
brings out the excitement. If I did the same task at work everyday,
every year, year in and year out, I would be so bored. Working
outdoors was also attractive to me early on since I like just about
anything outdoors. Taken together all these things keep me interested
in my profession.
I started out in life wanting to be a professional photographer
(I still enjoy photography today). But way back then I also liked
building things. So I went to Delta Junior College, and then got
into UC Berkeley, civil engineering. Part of my requirement was to
take a surveying class. I really, really liked it! A friend’s brother
then told me that I could get an engineering degree in surveying.
Iwork for the County of Santa Clara as the County
Surveyor. A County Surveyor’s duties can vary
depending on how the county is organized. For Santa
Clara County our main function is processing Records
of Surveys, Corner Records and Subdivision maps.
We also spend a lot of time providing assistance to the
public in researching maps, old and new and recorded
and unrecorded, from the vast collection of maps that
we’ve been accumulating since the 1800’s. Our map
collection even contains maps of lands that are outside
of our county. Historically, the Santa Clara County
Surveyor was an elected position. Many early County
Surveyors had their own private surveying (and civil
engineering) businesses. For that reason the map collections
of my predecessors often contain maps from
other parts of the state. One interesting situation was
when a historian was looking for a map in the
Monterey area near the Salinas River. She had done
extensive research in our office previously and she
knew we had a collection of maps from the Herrmann
era. We helped her find a map that showed the lands
of D. Jack from the 19th century. What makes this
story interesting is that the landowner, Jack, also
acquired a dairy where he made cheese. So the story
goes, eventually this cheese became known as
Monterey Jack.
What I especially like about this career is the
great variety in the work. For example, I enjoy the challenge of
wearing many different “hats.” There is a hat for the legal aspects
of boundary surveying, a hat for construction surveying, a hat for
GPS surveying, a hat for working with the California Coordinate
Systems, a hat for route surveying, a hat for hydrographic surveying,
etc., and finally a great big management hat to coordinate all
those other hats. For me there is among those hats a spark that
18
That was music to my ears! Off I went to get my engineering
degree in Surveying and Photogrammetry from Fresno State
University. I got a summer job in surveying and have been working
surveying jobs ever since. Both the education and the profession
have been very good to me.
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