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Hi. I'm Joe Paiva, CEO of GeoLearn. I'm sitting here with Gary Kent, who is one of our faculty.
Gary's just spent the last couple of days videotaping a number of his courses on ALTA/ACSM
Land Title Surveys.
Now that he's finished, he's relaxing, by giving us a little bit of his viewpoints on
life, in general, and, of course, about surveying. Hi Gary, thanks so much for doing all this
for us the last couple of days.
My pleasure, Joe. It's very exciting.
So I'd thought I'd make it a little bit easier for you on this little discussion here by
asking you, what got you into surveying?
I was, when I started college, I was going to be a physics major. I had taken physics
in high school, which was a little unusual at the time. I went to my first physics course
in college, which was basically a repeat for what I had done in high school, so I fairly
quickly got bored with that.
My grandfather was an engineer, actually a well-known engineer, a civil engineer. He
was President of American Public Works at one time. My mother thought I should be an
engineer, he thought I should be an engineer. I decided to go into Civil Engineering and
the very first course I took was a surveying course and it was taught by Warren Marks,
who was at Purdue at the time, and he was just an outstanding gentleman and very intelligent,
very well-spoken. And I took that course and I said, this is what I want to do.
Well, that's great. Warren Marks and Purdue, that's a good combination.
That is.
So what do you do at Schneider? I know you are employed there.
Yes, I've been there 31 years. I've had a number of positions there. I started out as
a project manager. I ran our survey department for a number of years. It got much bigger
than I wanted to be involved in management. It got to be probably about 100 people. I
decided that really wasn't I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be more directly involved
in surveying. So I asked them to remove me out of that position, so I could be more hands-on
in surveying again.
And so what I do now is I am a project manager. I manage projects. I do a lot of client contact.
I also have a number of safety responsibilities. I do training. I also do quite a bit of expert
witness work. And I do this sort of thing, I do seminars, which is part of what we do.
It's a marketing strategy on the part of the company.
I know we talked between breaks and you talked about your enjoyment of education and being
able to do that well, even in things like your expert witness work, which is one of
the reasons we identified you as one of our premier faculty, because we think your courses
will be very popular with us.
So just completely off surveying, what do you do for recreation?
Well, I travel a lot, as part of what I do with seminars. But I very much like traveling
and I've been to Europe three times. I've been to all 50 of the states. When I have
the opportunity, I like to go places, to stay at places, that I can and spend extra time.
In a few weeks, I'll be going up to Anchorage and Seattle. I've been to Denver this year.
So I like traveling.
I also enjoy reading a huge variety of different types of things. And I enjoy music, art, theatre.
In Indianapolis, we have a very active cultural community and even though I live 20 miles
out of town, I am downtown almost every weekend, taking in shows and music and that sort of
thing.
Now you haven't mentioned bicycling yet.
That's a good point. I do bicycle. I'm not a serious bicycler, but I have a fairly serious
bike. At least it was a top of the line bicycle in the '80s. It's a road bike and I do try
to ride as frequently as I can, just for exercise and for fun.
What got you involved with ALTA/ACSM surveys, the way you have? I know that you head up
a committee on the ACSM side or the NSBS side and SPS, I guess I should say. But also I
know you are a member of ALTA and I believe you head up the committee on that side, as
well.
Yes.
So when the two groups meet, do you kind of switch chairs, depending on whose position
you're voicing?
Yeah, that's an interesting thing. I originally became a member of ALTA because the previous
chair of their committee had retired and they really wanted somebody who understood the
survey side, and they didn't seem to have anyone. So they asked me if I wanted to be
the chair of their committee and I said, sure, I think I would like to do that. And I said,
what do I need to do? And they said, well you need to join the organization first.
So I did, and I very much enjoyed...I don't feel like I have to change hats when I'm there.
There is a misperception in the surveying community that somehow that this is a negotiation
that goes on and sometimes we're kind of beating each other up on wording, but it just isn't
that way.
And particularly, I think, as chair of the committee, both committees, I have a responsibility
to have a really intimate understanding of the title side of things. I understand surveying
pretty well, but I've worked really hard to be a student of title insurance, so that when
we're talking in a joint committee I can understand. When they're saying, well we have these issues,
I kind of understand that. So probably almost play a neutral role, when we have joint meetings.
Now I know you travel around the country a lot, teaching seminars, workshops and so forth.
In fact, it was quite a job to get you to juggle your schedule to come here to do these
two days of recording. Tell me a little bit, at least when it comes to surveying topics,
including ALTA/ACSM surveys, who are the non-surveyors that you also try to communicate with in your
seminars?
I have spoken to Land Title associations in three different states. I very much enjoy,
when I'm going around the country, many times the programs I'm giving are not necessarily
aimed directly at surveyors, but the provider may market them to surveyors, to title people,
to attorneys. So frequently, there are a number of attorneys in the programs that I'm presenting.
I also, as I said, am involved with the International Right Of Way Association, so I'm frequently
giving talks that involve, perhaps, land agents, right of way agents, ----- or appraisers,
people like that. So it's usually the people who are kind of around the periphery of surveying
and interact with surveyors. I really enjoy talking with them, because so often, as you
know, there's misperceptions about what surveyors do, why we do things. So I find it very helpful
and interesting to engage with them.
You are one of the first faculty to record at GeoLearn, very much in the formative stages
of GeoLearn. And we are learning a lot ourselves, as we try to do this GeoLearn thing. So, while
you have been on TV for interviews, you've done some courses online. I know you do a
lot of webinars and you told me you also did some radio and TV in high school. How has
this experience here at GeoLearn been, in terms of enjoying it and whether you felt
like you were accomplishing something.
I really enjoyed my last two days. I can't say that I was feeling stressful about it,
but you don't know, going into a new situation and dealing with the cameras and such. But
I really enjoyed it. And again, it's part of my interest in teaching, just a different
format, kind of trying to teach to the camera, in a sense, so that somebody who's watching
the course is going to get the benefit the same way that somebody might in a person-to-person,
in a classroom.
So I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good experience and, hopefully, our courses will reflect that.
I'm confident that they will. I enjoyed it, I'm looking forward to doing more of them.
Well, you will be, I think, a very good example for many of our other faculty, who will be
coming soon. We know some of them are a bit apprehensive about the whole thing, even though
they're excellent speakers on the topics, certainly, when they speak at conferences.
So we're hoping that when they see what you have done, they'll get some encouragement
out of it.
Now that you're doing this with us, do you see cutting back your travel schedule and
teaching less live courses?
You know, I actually do see that. Partially because I'm getting involved in this, partially
because...and I think part of what you all are doing with GeoLearn, and what we're doing
with GeoLearn, is a function of what's going on in society and in continuing education.
That like it or not, we can push against it, but we know those are the trends.
And so I think, for several reasons, I'll probably be doing some less of person-to-person,
particularly with some providers. I think the state surveying societies are always,
they always have their conferences, they always want people there, and you do a lot of that
yourself.
But I think otherwise we're going to see a gradual shift there, so I suspect we'll see
more and more of this, particularly quality type of things, like what we're trying to
do here at GeoLearn.
Well, thanks for spending all this time with us and for subjecting, allowing us to subject
you to this interview. I'm going to close by just telling everybody that, hopefully,
you got something out of this little bit of background information from Gary, that maybe
you don't even get when you see him at one of his conference presentations.
And if you can think of any questions you'd like us to ask him on a future visit, we'd
be more than happy to do this again, because we plan on interviewing all our faculty when
they come here.
And with that, we will sign off.