President's Message

Members,

I am thankful for the invitation from the University of Florida’s Student Chapter and the North Central Florida Chapter joint meeting last month to come and meet and speak with the new students at their first meeting of the year. It was great to hear their stories about what brought them to the Geomatics Program, what their goals were and how many of them were leaning towards surveying or the geospatial track, about 60/40 in this group, that didn’t include all students.

I gave a 1-hour presentation to both Chapters, covering some unique project experiences I have had over the past 5 decades. These were not your typical survey projects, but ones that had significant challenges to overcome. It was appropriately named “Thinking Outside the Box, with Lasers and GIS”.

I have always enjoyed a challenge that spurs the imagination and gets the blood and brain working overtime. I am constantly researching things that interest me related to surveying, mapping, remote sensing and history. However, I have to credit my enthusiasm, confidence, and inspiration to the terrific mentors I had in my first 20 years in Surveying. Two well respected Surveyors in my area, John Z. Rowe, RLS 1901 and Robert P. Legg, RLS 2972. They both were unique in their personalities and survey experiences, and both taught and inspired me to continue to learn as much as I could every day.

I am a true believer in the concept of “pass it forward”, as it was given to me early in my career, and I think has served me well in everything I have accomplished since. I look out there in our profession and see this vast resource of knowledge and experience in my friends and peers, and I am hopeful that all of them are willing and able to do the same.

I think our future as a profession, deeply rooted in history, and with access to some of the most advanced technologies available to any business, is in a unique position to leverage those resources to make a difference and draw in more younger people to join us and expand our position and reputation.

Call me optimistic, but the sharing of our knowledge and experiences to others, mentoring of students or those individuals in our own organizations that may be potential Surveyors of the future can only help to provide them with more important information than they would get in any school, and help them feel more confident and make them better students and employees. Giving of your time to others to help lift them up benefits everyone. The sharing of those hidden stories from our careers can be the platform to expand our presence and reach a vast and as yet untapped resource of new Surveyor/Geomatic students and/or recruits from other professions.

Our newly formed “Work Force Development” committee and UF’s commitment on the same subject with the new hire of Katie Britt is a step in the right direction. Even though it won’t do much in the short term, we have made the commitment to look toward the future and are taking the steps necessary to make it happen. Your support, ideas, and suggestions to FSMS and UF’s program will be greatly appreciated in this endeavor.

Lastly, I recently found one of those hidden treasures from history. It’s an unbelievable account of the USA Public Domain (Public Lands) from 1883-84, in a report by Thomas Donaldson of the U. S. Public Land Commission, Committee on Codification with statistics and historical data on all of the Public Lands in the USA covering the continental US and Alaska at the time. I separated out the information on the history of Florida in a separate download link, and also supplied the link to the entire 1415-page report in this volume of “The Florida Surveyor” magazine.

Hope you enjoy and immerse yourself in some fascinating reading and history.

Respectfully submitted,

Richard D. Pryce

Previous 2024 Messages
January 2024
February 2024
March 2024
April 2024
May 2024
June 2024
July/August 2024