16 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 47, No. 1 2023 Surveyor of the Year The Surveyor of the Year award is the opportunity to recognize a member of the professional community that stood out among the crowd for their contribution to PLSO and the profession. OF THE YEAR 2022 Surveyor Jack Walker 2023 The PLSO team had selected Professor Jack Walker, Professor and Chair in the Geomatics Department of Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, to be featured in a Member Spotlight as we normally do within the pages of each issue. Then we got the news that there were some significant changes coming up within the Geomatics Department at Oregon Institute of Technology, where he has been a professor for 39 years. Then we got the news that he announced his retirement to take place in 2024. Then he was nominated, and ultimately selected, as Surveyor of the Year! There was obviously a lot to talk to Dr. Walker about. We talked to him, let him answer some questions here, and we highlighted some of the important changes taking place within OIT on page 20. Congratulations to Jack Walker as Surveyor of the Year! Jack Walker is a first-generation college student, so he started off in life not really having any idea of what a college career could look like. He knew he liked math and science, which led him to think that a civil engineering job would be good. But he quickly realized that wasn’t right for him. “I did enjoy that,” he says, “but I came to realize that civil engineers live in a cubicle. And I always liked to get outdoors and do things so I wasn’t really looking forward to cubicle life for a whole career.” All civil students take a surveying course, so that was how he learned that surveyors got to go out onto the land to collect data. Surveyors get to work with high-tech equipment and software, which was interesting to him. He’s also always liked maps. “My wife makes me hang them in the garage,” he says with a laugh. “And surveyors get paid to make maps, so I switched majors.” Even more exciting was when Walker found out that surveyors deal with non-Euclidean geometry. “I became really interested in the mathematics of the curved Earth, which is the field of geodesy,” he says. A young Jack Walker at his desk.
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