Every fall, engineering students descend upon Lafayette College’s campus grounds, armed with camera-like equipment and gigantic rods – much to the confusion of non-engineering bystanders.
These students are a part of “Land Development-Surveying,” a required course for civil engineering majors to get hands-on experience surveying various campus buildings. This practice is used professionally to access land in preparation for construction projects.
“I thought it was for some other photography project,” said Eli Byrnes ’26, a current student in the class.
Students in the course have become used to people passing by and taking an interest in their work.
Byrnes said that “sometimes you’ll get asked from a friend” about the project or “you’ll just see people looking, trying to figure it out for themselves.”
“It raises curiosity, and I like to think that the stuff we’re doing, people are actually interested in it,” said Shanza Asif ‘27, another student in the class. “You wouldn’t see people just talking about a chemistry lab and looking in and trying to figure out what’s happening.”
Using the brightly-colored equipment, the class measures the elevation of different points around campus and determines the heights of buildings in a process called differential leveling. They also map various campus structures using a coordinate system and reference points in a process called traversing.
The “camera” is a total station, a tool used to measure angles on horizontal and vertical planes. It works in tandem with the pole to retrieve information from the landscape.
“The little rod with the piece of glass on top of it, that’s called a prism,” said Tom Barlow, an adjunct instructor of civil engineering and instructor of the class. “The total station emits a beam of energy, and it bounces off and goes back to and that’s how it measures distance.”
Fear not, walking in front of the equipment will not disturb data collection.
“They’re really highly focused and highly zoomed in,” Byrnes said. “So odds are that if you feel like you’re walking in front of it, it usually won’t make a difference, because you’ll only be in front of it for a quarter of a second, and it’s not continuously measuring something.”
Learning how to take these measurements is difficult without practical experience, according to Asif.
“When he also lectures, it’s hard to imagine what it would look like,” she said of Barlow. “Even watching someone else do it, you’re confused. But once you’re in those shoes and you start using it, I feel like just practice makes it better.”
This hands-on learning takes place under all weather conditions.
“Usually the weather is beautiful, but this is a rain or shine class, so the equipment can get wet,” Barlow said. “So if it’s raining and our lab is Tuesday, either wear a raincoat or bring an umbrella, or you get wet.”
By the end of the semester, the class will have created a comprehensive chart of the college using their measurements.
“We’re essentially making our own dot-to-dot where all of those points get dumped in and then we draw the picture from those observations,” Barlow said.
Barlow, who has been surveying for over 30 years, believes that having fieldwork experience is invaluable to his student’s learning.
“You’re actually taking all of these math classes and all of these other classes that you’ve taken in your career so far and coming out here and doing something tangible,” he said.
Barlow’s expertise and experience in the workforce has been helpful for his students.
“He understands that this is our first time using this equipment, so he’s not expecting a professional standard,” Byrnes said. “He has a great mix of professional advice, as well as just being a professor and helping students, realizing where we’re coming from.”
For Byrnes, having this experience means getting a leg up in his job search.
“That was something I talked to a lot with different surveying contractors and civil engineering firms — that I have this experience and it’s something that they won’t have to teach me when I first joined their team,” Byrnes said. “I know it’s something that is really valuable in the industry.”
He encourages curious students to ask questions the next time they see the surveyors.
“If students are interested, not only just to ask the people doing the work, I’m sure they’d be happy to explain it,” Byrnes said. “But also seeing in the future, if they have time for the class and they just want to do something that’s a little bit different at Lafayette, I think it’s a really unique experience that not a lot of people can do.”
