Interview with Dave Robson, chairman and founder of Veritas DGC
Dolores Proubasta · The Leading Edge · 2000
How did you first land a job in geophysics? Through horses. I'm old enough to have ridden a horse to a country school in the wintertime in Canada because we didn't have snowplows, so we had these workhorses that we rode when the snow was too deep to walk. After I got out of the University of Alberta in 1964, I ended up with some better riding horses. A friend and I were living in a ranch west of Calgary boarding horses as a part-time occupation. One night there was a knock at the door and this fellow we had never seen before asked us, “Do you want to rent some land from us around here, fence it off and you can use it to run your horses?” We said, sure, we'd do that. He looked at my iron ring on my little finger and recognized that I was an engineer; and he had one on too. “What kind?” he asked. “Electrical,” I said. “Oh! We've got this seismic business … this electronics lab … maybe you should come down and talk to me.” I was working for a building contractor at the time, which I didn't find very exciting, so I did. My first assignment was six weeks in the bush in northern Alberta, planting geophones by day and fixing electronics at night. After that I worked in their electronics lab. And that's how I started; it was kind of fluky.