Engineering Intern Making Most of A Summer Spent Helping Robbinsdale

Ben Surma is on to another career, this time as a surveyor.

“It started in January, when I started back at school again,” said the 33-year-old Surma, who lives in Richfield. “Prior to this, I was a public transit service analyst, and I decided I want to get back into the field and do something a little more with my hands again, something a little more physical. I had in a previous, previous career done some work in road construction, so this is related to something I was already a little bit familiar with.”

Dunwoody College student Ben Surma has spent the summer interning with the City of Robbinsdale.

He’s spent several weeks this summer interning with the City of Robbinsdale.

“I’ve been calling this my bonus semester because I’m in between my two semesters at Dunwoody, and it’s really been an extension of what I learned this spring: the fundamentals of surveying and the basics of how to use AutoCAD,” he said. “They’ve really given me a good mix of tasks to do both of those things.”

He’s working on surveying the future sites for the next rounds of road reconstruction in the city.

“Construction doesn’t begin the year it begins, it begins several years ahead of time with lots and lots of preparatory work,” said Surma. “I think Robbinsdale has a really good balance and a really good engineering team who are really willing to teach you hands-on, and give you that experience hands-on in multiple different areas: not just in the field, not just in the office, but seeing how that all blends together and creates something really useful and purposeful.”

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