Surveying education at the New Zealand National School of Surveying

The School of Surveying, University of Otago, continues to successfully offer a top quality professional degree programme for the New Zealand survey profession. It is actively looking to add other more specialised degrees, to allow for the recruitment of more students, to promote more obvious postgraduate opportunities and to follow a trend to more diverse professional engagement. At the same time, there is a renewed focus on enhancing research output to complement the quality teaching programme. This paper briefly outlines the origins of the New Zealand educational system for surveyors and discusses in more detail the suite of programmes and courses that the School of Surveying at the University of Otago offers to those interested in a career in the collection, manipulation, organisation, storage and interpretation of data related to land, land based resources, the sea bed and their use in the development of the built environment. The options open for professional recognition for these graduates are then discussed. New Zealand surveyors continue to gain employment in a variety of subdisciplines in all corners of the world. They carry with them the considerable reputation of surveying graduates from the University of Otago and land surveyors from New Zealand.