As a student, it’s always exciting when we get to leave the lecture theatre and even more exciting when we go on a visit. The rest of Stage 2 Geomatics (that’s the Surveying & Mapping and GIS students) and I visited the Newcastle offices of Wardell Armstrong. As we walked through the offices on the way to one of the meeting rooms, it was good to see some of the employees on software packages that we recognised and often use in our degree programmes, such as ArcGIS and QGIS. The company has a specialised mapping team of 10 staff. We heard from four different speakers, two of whom were alumni of our own degree courses.

The first speaker, Chris, was the Director of the mapping team and introduced us to the company, its history and a few of their major clients. They are a very international company, with operations all over the planet. Having many opportunities to travel after graduation is one of the reasons why I like the course I’m studying. He was very complimentary of his team and their work, which was good to hear.

Claire, an alumna of the GIS course, then spoke about a project regarding an Armenian gold mine where they are planning to literally take the top off a mountain.  She had to collaborate with teams in Denver, Colorado as well as Armenia and South Africa, which demonstrates the global nature of the industry and shows what an important role that we as graduates would be able to take up after only a few years of experience. The video below shows the project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusjrlRLaoA

The third person to speak to us, Harriet, talked about challenging act of managing a huge amount of GI data that covers England, Wales and Scotland, and some other countries around the world. To maintain a complete and comprehensive database of information for the United Kingdom, as Harriet explained, was much more efficient and effective than only collecting the information that was necessary for a project.

The final speaker, Dave, was a graduate of the Surveying & Mapping course who graduated in 2003. He’d been with Wardell Armstrong since leaving university and had worked his way up the ranks from a graduate surveyor through to a being an Associate Director.

The final part of the session was a quick talk about careers and Q&A session with lots of staff. It was very useful of Chris to not focus the careers talk on WA, but instead the whole industry. He mentioned how, as employers, they considered ‘life’ experience to be as relevant as ‘work’ experience, and emphasised how important it was to display initiative.

All in all, the visit was really worthwhile and gave a useful and realistic insight into the workings of a surveying consultancy that utilises all the skills gained during the SMS and GIS degree programmes.