Begin with the end in mind.
SINCE 1983.
National Honors for Clark College YSN Survey Team & Westlake’s Own Bobby Clapham
We’ve invited Westlake’s Robert “Bobby” Clapham, Jr., to guest blog about his experience competing in the 2025 National Young Surveyors Student Competition. This competition, put on by the National Society of Professional Surveyors, brings student teams from across the U.S. to Washington DC for a week packed with competition and networking.
Bobby is a full-time survey technician in Westlake’s Industrial Measurement Division while working toward a degree in Surveying & Geomatics at Clark College. Westlake was proud to support Bobby, and the *Boustrophedonics, as a team sponsor.
*Team name chosen by the Clark College students. It is defined by Bobby later in this blog.
We asked Bobby to chronicle this exciting week and the preparation leading up to the competition.
Young Surveyors Network Competition Journaling
By Robert Clapham, Jr.
Preparing For Competition
Our team knew that if we were going to be competitive, we had to keep our heads in the game. The pressure was on, as we’d be the first team ever competing from Washington state.
For busy adults with jobs on top of responsibilities outside of school, we had done a pretty good job at meeting up and testing out equipment in the month before the competition.
Half of the equipment teams are tested on are modern day models including the Trimble SX10 Total Station and the Leica GS18 T Rover. We would also use state-of-the-art data collectors (DCs). Most of us were familiar with this equipment from our current work as surveyors.
What we were worried about was the 1970’s-era Wild T2 Transit (or “Universal Theodolite”), the staff compasses, and the old, trusty Gunter’s Chain (introduced to the world in 1620!). These surveying tools had not been regularly used for at least a generation and took some getting used to.
Sunday, March 16 – Arrival in DC
Flying into DC, I caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument rising into view as the plane touched down. I’d been in DC as a 5th grader, but seeing the monument was poignant as I reflected on our first founding father’s chosen profession of surveying and the throughline of surveying history from him to me. Prior to the trip, I’d relearned about the use of “golden ratio” angles which were used to determine how the Capital’s streets would lay, projecting out from the central point of the White House, right-angled South, and then to the East to meet the Capitol Building at the Jefferson Pier. I was excited to see this ancient and artistic mathematical relationship of special angles represented in the existing streets.
As I left the airport, following the signs for my rideshare pickup location, I noticed a scribe X in the sidewalk. Every surveyor reading this is going to say, “of course you did”. Any surveyor knows that a scribe X is a control point another surveyor has etched in concrete for use in positioning the instrument. And as any surveyor knows, this is only one of the many items we get distracted by, everywhere we go.
After checking into the hotel, I met up with my teammates at a nearby Irish pub called McGinty’s. This was quite appropriate, after all, since the next day was St. Paddy’s Day and we were hoping for some luck o’ the Irish. It was great to settle in with the team that I had grown to be very fond of and shoot the breeze as we talked about the week to come.
Monday, March 17 – Orientation & Site Seeing
I woke up to a flurry of hotel room doors opening and closing in the hallway at 6:00 in the morning. It wasn’t a wonder why. The Young Surveyors Network (YSN) had packed out this floor of the hotel, and during the busy week ahead, Monday was to be our only real day available to sightsee. An amazing collection of museums and monuments awaited! Even though my internal clock roused me at what would be 3AM on the West Coast, I was excited to start the day.
Meeting up with my teammates, we enjoyed an early morning walk around the downtown area which includes the vast mall area, seeing the Lincoln Memorial, the World Ware II Memorial, the Washington Monument, reflection pools, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the Library of Congress. Remembering my visit here as a 10-year-old, I reflected on how the subsequent 24 years had given me so much more perspective and insight into our country. Seeing these monuments and thinking about the stories of the people who had so much impact on US history felt nothing short of momentous.
After a great day in the city surrounded by history, the team headed back to the hotel for Orientation. There was a very cool display of old, original equipment that served surveyors of the past for so long. The collection included items like two staff compasses from the 1800’s, Gunter’s chain (one proper 66’, and two half chains, which we were told were the more widely used due to it incurring less error from sag), a whole table full of late 20th century GPS and EDM implements (which we would not use in the competition, but were still very cool), and to bring it to modern day, a Trimble S10 Total station and 360 prism.
We were able to ask all the vendors at the individual stations general questions about what was to be expected of us on the Field Day, and they were all very helpful. I would like to pause for a moment to thank those that donated their time to bring the equipment for us and let us fumble around with it for a little bit. You really do make a huge difference in our surveying community, and I thank you very much.
Monday evening our team met and came up with a plan for the monument hunt scheduled for the next morning and had a good pep-talk session. I felt some real pride in our team, which we dubbed “The Boustrophedonics” (defined at the end of this blog).
Tuesday, March 18 – The Hunt is On!
Our team gathered early at the Metro station, and met our Young Surveyor’s Network representative, Isac, who was to help us log our findings into ArcGIS Field Maps. Teams were released at 15-minute intervals, and we were chomping at the bit to get going as we waited. Finally, we were called to get ready, get set, and GO! And go, we did! Right away, we were able to snag a pretty cool pedestal monument in a courtyard on the other side of the Metro station, and after a short 5-minute bus ride, we grabbed our first Washington D.C. Boundary Stone. It was a glorious find! We captured the Northernmost stone on the boundary line between D.C. and Maryland, situated at the North tip of the diamond that was the original shape of the District of Columbia. This was a location chosen by George Washington himself and set during his lifetime!
After that coup, we ran, hopped on and off of busses and trains, and searched with laser focus to capture as many monuments as possible in the 6 hours allowed for the hunt. Our feet pounded the pavement, we trudged through brush, and spun ourselves in circles consulting the GPS and monument descriptions on our phones to rack up points.
My teammate, Milad Sadegi was on navigating duty, and he deftly led us on to the proper public transport to get us to the next markers. Our team captain, Rebecca Dunphy, and I were taking photos of the team at each of the monuments we found, posting them to social media, since doing so would land us extra points.
It was a long day, and we were all feeling it by the end of the allotted time. Our 6 hours were up at 2PM, and by 1:20PM, we had found our last stone. All in all, we found 8 boundary stones, all along the NE D.C. boundary, and one on the SE side of the diamond. Nothing like a good day’s worth of monument hunting to make a surveyor feel a sense of accomplishment!
Wednesday, March 19 – Field Exercises
As hard as we worked during the monument hunt, Wednesday promised to be even more trying as we would test ourselves with field exercises and calculations. First up was the Leica GPS exercise. Hardcore survey calculations at the crack of dawn turned out to be a better wake-up aid than coffee! Our team pored over a tiny prompt sheet of exercise questions, trying to dissect parts of the problem that our individual skill sets could best tackle. I think my teammates would say the same thing, but I thought everyone but myself exhibited stunning calculation abilities.
The next exercise, solving a curve question, proved to be even tougher. None of us had been expecting this, and YSN had kept the question content pretty close to the vest. None of the team had even practiced for curve problems. However, we were able to enter calculated points in the Data Collector by hand and also stake out 4 of the 8 points using a Trimble SX10.
We then moved on to the Theodolite Triangulation exercise, in which we were to use a non-electronic, 1970’s era Wild T2 Theodolite. This was an instrument none of us had any experience using prior to prepping for the competition. Huge thanks go out to Clark College’s Surveying & Geomatics department head, Tim Kent (now retired). He had arranged for us to practice with a Wild T16 Theodolite, similar to the one we’d use in competition. My teammate, Milad Sadegi, had practiced with it quite a bit while preparing for competition. Brian Hankins and I had also taken a day to geek out with the T16 a few weeks before the competition, so the three of us felt, if not confident, at least not completely in the dark using the T2 in competition. While we wrangled the T2, Rebecca Dunphy, Eli Deschand, and Trevor Geivett turned the angles and verified each other, using the pinnacle of the Washington Monument as a bearing for an angle. Our team then used the angles, and some known distances, to solve the rest of a triangle to find the area. It all went pretty swell!
We’d been on a roll all day, but by the time we made it to the last exercise (the staff compass and Gunter’s chain traverse) we were all pretty beat. It had been nearly 5 hours straight of performing survey calculations, and our brains were a little fried. Even so, I felt lucky that my designated duty on this exercise was to be on the chainman gang. It was an inspired feeling to be surveying using the same technique those in our profession had used for centuries before me. I’ve always had so much respect for the early surveyors, and there with the Washington Monument looming behind me, I felt like George Washington and all those surveyors of old were smiling proudly on our team.
Thursday, March 20 – Awards Luncheon
Hopes were not high among the Boustrophedonics team. We’d learned that the previous day we hadn’t received the equation sheet which could be used for doing most of the required calculations, and that we were the only team missing this aid. We thought that for sure we were toast without a leg up like that, but still all agreed the week had been a fantastic learning and networking experience.
Following lunch, we sat down for the start of the awards. University of Maine took a top 4-year program award, and I absolutely loved their matching lobster shirts. Our team sat clapping and cheering for other teams to receive accolades. I was especially impressed that a high school team in Texas took second place in our 2-year program division and was lost in thought about how great it would have been to discover surveying in high school, when we were called up to claim first place! It was a huge surprise to us, and after exchanging shocked looks with my teammates, and a hug or two, we made our way to the front of the room to receive the first-place award.
We shook hands all around, congratulating the other teams on their wins, and having made it through the competition. I took some photos to commemorate the day and talked to some of the officials including the fantastic Alex Chose, our YSN representative from Washington. Some of us stayed for the final meeting of the YSN at the hotel, where we received a great amount of support to come back as competitors and contributors, and some more congratulations. It certainly was an experience that’d I’d be all too willing to repeat, so I do hope that I find the chance to take them up on the offer of returning as a volunteer.
Later that afternoon as I boarded the plane back to Oregon, it felt bittersweet to say goodbye to D.C. but on-so-sweet to have had this amazing experience.
Boustrophedon is Greek for “as the ox plows”, being the way that the U.S. PLSS system mapped out and divided a vast majority of the land in America. From the top of a township, a surveyor moved systematically from left to right, dropped a row down, then went right to left, and repeated on and on. This is also the way that many a modern surveyor still plots out a topographic survey. It is an old, tried and true surveying method. I think we made our forebearers proud and met all the challenges that came our way. Not bad for a first-time school at the competition. I would highly recommend this experience to anybody who has a similar love for surveying.