Employer
Project Surveyors
Length of time working in surveying
10 years
Qualifications
Master of Engineering Majoring in Geodesy and Cartography (Specialising in Geoinformatics)
Bachelor of Engineering (Civil Engineering)
Bachelor of Engineering (Geodesy and Cartography)
Registered Land Surveying NSW
The winner of the 2019 Young Surveying Professional of the Year EISSI Award took an intriguing path to join the Australian surveying community. Of course, her work since that point has more than qualified her to step into the esteemed ranks of the award’s past recipients.
Born, raised and schooled in rural Poland, Anna Paterak’s early life was spent in the town of Glucholazy where she excelled at mathematics and loved the outdoors. That’s the perfect mix for a future career in surveying, no doubt! She applied for university and completed multiple degrees, emerging seven years later ready to start working.
Anna’s surveying career proper started in Poland with a small private company, working on everything from drafting work through to high construction. This was the stepping-stone she needed to step into a larger civil engineering company: Portugal’s Mota-Engil.
It wasn’t until 2011 that Anna made her first visit to Australia, and she immediately decided to work out how to move here. To complete the process of acquiring a Visa, Anna had to prove that she could add value to a local Australian company.
She also had to get to grips with a new language, English technical terms and surveying lingo, and legal & historical precedents in the NSW cadastral system – not to mention the foreign customs of an entire country!
By June 2014, Anna was working with Project Surveyors and had begun the surveyor registration process. In 2017 she became an Australian citizen; and in 2018, she became the 29thfemale surveyor in New South Wales to be registered as a land surveyor.
It was this robust commitment to furthering her surveying qualifications in a new country – and the extra lengths Anna went to mastering the English language – that made it such an easy decision to award Anna with the 2019 award for Young Surveying Professional of the Year.
