Wendy Lathrop - Female pioneer in NJ Land Surveying
By James K. Valenti, PE, Esq.
The 2nd PLS in NJ, and still working today - Q & A
Wendy Lathrop was the 2nd female to become a Professional Land Surveyor in New Jersey. Incredibly, this happened in 1983, not very long ago. One of Wendy’s close friends, Diane Evans, was the 1st female PLS in New Jersey, having received her license in 1981. Diane has retired, but Wendy is still an active Surveyor today. Wendy has an extraordinary and diverse career in land surveying and floodplain management. We asked her to provide details on her experience and advice for future land surveyors.
Where were you born and grow up?
I was born in Hollywood, California, the closest hospital to where my parents lived in Santa Monica. We moved to Garden City, New York when I was 2, and to Levittown, Pennsylvania just before I turned 4. I lived in Levittown until I was 18 and left home to earn my way through college.
Where did you go to college and graduate school?
Albion College in Michigan is where I earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Spanish and Visual Arts. At University of Pennsylvania, I earned a Master of Environmental Studies, specializing in environmental policy.
Why did you get interested in Land Surveying?
I fell into it after graduating from college, never having heard of surveying until my first full time job. I was hired for that position based on both my art portfolio and my drafting ability (having taken extensive drafting classes in high school), and soon moved into breaking down field notes as well because my math skills were good, too. The second company I worked for was so small that we all had to know how to do everything, from writing proposals to doing research to doing the field work and then turning the notes into drawings, reports, and descriptions.
What part of surveying do you enjoy the most?
I like using both sides of my brain to come up with answers and think about things from different angles. I like doing historical research to figure out how a tract originated and evolved over time. I like the visual mathematics that surveying involves. I like educating clients so that they can make better decisions about what to do with their properties or problem neighbors (seeing the lights turn on is exciting). I can’t say I’ve ever loved picking off ticks or getting hypothermia (twice). But I like figuring things out and learning in the process.
What did you need to do to get your New Jersey Professional Land Surveyor license and other licenses?
My New Jersey surveying license (in 1983) was my second surveying license, the first being in Pennsylvania (in 1982), even though I lived in NJ at the time. There was a very specific reason for that sequence, even though both states had similar requirements regarding years and types of experience. Pennsylvania had already moved to a two-day exam, then comprised of 12 hours of national exam and 4 hours of state-specific exam (the format later changed to 14 hours of national exam and 2 hours of state-specific). New Jersey had a one-day exam that was regularly demeaned as being one that any math major could pass without know much about surveying at all, and no other state would accept it for either comity or reciprocity. So, after earning my PA license (on the first try, after preparing through taking correspondence courses through ICS and surveying courses at night at Mercer County College in West Windsor, NJ and Drexel University in Philadelphia), I sent in an application to the NJ Board to see what I would need to do. They mailed me a one page exam with basic questions regarding title blocks and a few other mundane items requiring no knowledge of surveying (just regulations), I mailed it back with my answers, and in return was informed of my new status as a licensed New Jersey Surveyor.
The 12 hour national exam I had taken for Pennsylvania was not long enough to suit Delaware when I applied for licensure there, by which time the national exam had expanded to 14 hours. So, besides Delaware’s two hour state-specific exam (entirely on drainage), I was required to take a four hour section of Principles and Practice since there were no 2 hour exams to make up the missing time. It was a little ridiculous, especially as at that point I had been teaching for several years out of the same book the exam was based upon, so of course I passed (1991). (I had studied up on the drainage I knew was the focus of the state-specific part with a co-worker who used to teach engineering at Cornell.). Because Pennsylvania defines surveying as a branch of engineering and it was my original license, Maryland (1992), another engineering-based state, gave me full reciprocity with no exam required.
What are your top accomplishments as a PLS?
Earning my licenses and earning the respect of my colleagues enough to be elected to lead both NJSPLS and NSPS are solid accomplishments. But I think the top one, which I never realized until having others point it out to me, is having been a role model for other women surveyors. I never set out to be a leader or a role model or anything other than a good surveyor. But I hear from women who know of me through classes I teach around the country or through my column in “American Surveyor” magazine that they have been encouraged by what I’ve accomplished. It’s a shock, but something I feel good about. Being pretty shy most of the time, it’s embarrassing, too, but I’m glad to know women are moving forward, whatever it takes. Another thing that makes me feel good is running into people who were students in various classes I taught, either at Mercer County College or Drexel, and hearing of their successes. The most unusual of these examples was from two years ago, when I ran into someone in Tennessee who had taken an exam review course I co-taught at Drexel about 30 years before. I didn’t remember anyone from that huge group from so long ago, but he remembered me, having passed his exam on the first try.
What is the most memorable land surveying project you have ever worked on?
That was probably the recovery of Station Disboro, a team effort spearheaded by PLSANJ, my chapter of NJSPLS, and involving the National Geodetic Survey advisor to help us reset a new surface monument to preserve the location. Disboro was part of the original triangulation survey to map the coast of the United States after our nation’s vulnerability was realized during the War of 1812. This particular subsurface monument was set in 1839 by the first head of the Coastal Survey, Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. It had not been seen for nearly 50 years by the time we went looking for it in 1982, and the area was heavily wooded (with a LOT of briars).
The research, the field work, the team work, the excitement of finding it – I tried capturing all of that in articles I published (one of which won a journalism award from NSPS). They did inspire other surveyors in other parts of the country to do historical recovery projects, but the emotions were impossible to capture in words. How do you fully describe being with just one other remaining surveyor at the end of a grueling day of cutting line, darkness descending and misty rain starting, and hearing a “clink” as our machetes struck the top of the ancient cone? Merc Lucchi and I were dancing around like crazy people, laughing and shouting, nothing that could be put into a technical report. Merc has since passed away, but his son (also a surveyor) says Merc frequently talked about that undertaking as one of his highlights, too.
How has the profession of land surveying changed since you started working in this profession?
The technology has advanced phenomenally. It is a little unnerving to see some of the equipment I used to run in the 1970s and early 1980s grouped in with “antiques” – not just the open standard transits but even some of the early distance measuring devices! But it is wonderful not to have to haul something the size of a small refrigerator (Geodimeter) around anymore. And computing power is amazing, too. When the office I was working in during the mid 1970s got a portable calculator that could add, subtract, multiply and divide, it cost about $400, a small fortune back then. It was the size of two bricks and weighed about that much, too. The fact that I can now do trig functions on my phone, and take photos with my phone, and do so much more with so much less or lighter equipment sure makes life easier in many ways. But I do worry that some people don’t understand the scientific principles and math well enough to know if numbers getting spit out by calculators and computers make sense, or don’t understand principles of boundaries well enough to accept that math is definitely not the answer to a discrepancy between deeds.
Beyond the hardware and software aspects of surveying, I do see more women in the profession (although varying greatly in number and percentage between states) and I find that encouraging. And I see women being more accepted as leaders, too – two women presidents of NSPS will serve within just a couple of years of each other, while there were ten years between me as the first in 1996 and Rita Lumos as the second in 2007. Now we have Lisa Van Horn (2019) and Amanda Allred coming up (2022).
Describe some of the major challenges you faced in being a female PLS?
That’s hard to know where to start. The ones immediately coming to mind are dramatic pay inequities, sexual harassment (both in the office and in the field, sometimes even at professional conferences), being ignored or belittled in meetings, being passed over for promotions or special assignments in favor of a male less qualified. And I hated having to accept problem employees on my field crew when they were rejected by other party chiefs (often summer employees who were relatives of bosses). All I ever wanted to do was just be a surveyor, and I didn’t realize I was “different” until people pointed it out to me, not always in flattering ways. I never thought of myself as a “female surveyor”, just as a “surveyor”. Period.
The fact that I still face some of the same bad things all these years later is truly discouraging. What’s worse is knowing I’m not alone. A younger friend in another state recently dropped out of surveying because of co-workers taking credit for her contributions and publicly belittling her constantly; despite her appeals to higher ups, she had no real support from them beyond acknowledgment of the reality of the problems.
What advice to you have for a young woman looking to become a land surveyor today?
Probably the first thing is to have a thick skin. There are still people out there who talk about level playing fields but don’t practice that in real life, making it hard for women to be ourselves and earn our proper places in our profession. Speaking out when something is unfair sometimes earns women some nasty names, whereas men doing the same thing are admired for standing up for what they believe is right.
The next thing is to know that each of us excels in different ways, and that when we find what it is we love about our profession and throw ourselves into it, we can have a wonderfully satisfying career full of challenges, hardships, opportunities to both succeed and even fail, but we need to accept that all of that is human. Surveying is full of so many opportunities to learn, and the world is full of so many opportunities to apply our special knowledge to meet a wide variety of needs. It does sometimes require willingness to step beyond our comfort zones, opening our minds to new perspectives or new information, but that’s true of just about anything I can think of that is worth doing, whether work or hobbies or personal relationships.
And one more important piece is having a champion, someone who believes in your ability to succeed, who will help you find answers, who will mentor you or find someone who can. I was so fortunate to have two fantastic mentors when I decided to become licensed, two men who didn’t treat me like an oddity and helped me keep going when I wasn’t sure I could make it. It helps to have someone at home or a close friend who believes in you, too, because sometimes we need an arm to lean on, an ear to hear out our frustrations, and a heart that is willing to accept us whether we succeed right away or need encouragement to keep on trying.
THANK YOU WENDY !!!
