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Ms Loh Sook Yee Surveyor SLA loh_sook_yee@sla.gov.sg  The Singapore Land Authority's (SLA) only female surveyor, Ms Loh Sook Yee, became the first Asian woman to win the coveted Hart Prize in Surveying from the Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering from the University of Central London (UCL) in February this year. At just 28 years of age, she is the youngest woman surveyor in Singapore. She shares her professional growth story. "I confirmed my inclination towards geospatial science in my university days, when I realised I was willing to spend much more effort in my GIS elective module than in my Civil Engineering core module. Having done a mobile mapping project in university got me my first job with the SLA, the national survey and mapping authority in Singapore. I joined the Land Information Centre where I got to gain hands-on skills in using various GIS software packages including those from ESRI, Intergraph and Autodesk. I was also one of the Project Managers in SLA's project to convert land information to be in the newly gazetted national coordinated cadastral survey system, i.e. SVY21 in 2004. As part of career development, job rotation across departments is common in SLA. I was transferred to the Survey Services department where I got to experience another spectrum of geospatial science - cadastral surveying and geodetic control. Here, I gained field survey experience playing with different types of surveying tools including Total Station and GPS. My daily job requirement was to ensure smooth field operation and technology procurement. In 2006, SLA embarked on a project to provide national Differential GPS (DGPS) services in Singapore for the first time. Getting involved in setting up the GPS Reference Station Network, i.e. Singapore Satellite Positioning Reference Network (SiReNT) gave me a whole new outlook on GPS. It was a new experience looking after the Business Development aspects, including designing a pricing model for DGPS services and developing marketing tools such as brochures, website, Customer Handbook and User Guide. SLA then offered me a Postgraduate Scholarship to do a Master of Science in Surveying at UCL, United Kingdom. My 3-year working experience in SLA helped me appreciate the theories learned at UCL much more than my coursemates did. With the support of SLA's management, I also managed to get an attachment stint at the national mapping agency of Great Britain, Ordnance Survey, for 2 months upon my graduation from the Masters Degree. I learnt that professionals who are in the geospatial science industry are generally down-to-earth people with a passion for the outdoors and gadgets. Many may view that Singapore, as a city state, does not need a great pool of geospatial science professionals to support location-based applications. However, I think that Singapore has its unique set of problems when it comes to land administration and other related activities due to its dense population. I enjoy my work because of the diversity it offers. I get to witness and be involved in the whole cycle of the mapmaking process, from data collection in the field, converting the data into readable digital format to be stored in the database, preparing it to be displayed on the mapping software to performing analyses using the data collected and finally presenting it in a pretty map for users' visualisation. There are always emerging opportunities in geospatial science arising from the perpetual technological advancements. As a geospatial science professional, I relish the challenges to constantly learn new things and these are one of the many things that keep me going. Page 1 of 1
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