Like many kids, I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to be when I "grew up." Finally, I just grew up and figured it out in retrospect. What I'm trying to say here, is unless you are one of those remarkably focused young people whose future seems crystal clear, you probably don't know what your career will be. For this reason, I chose to be educated as broadly as possible. I attended a small liberal arts college on the east coast of the U.S., and graduated with a major in physics. Somehow, no clear answers as to my career path presented themselves to me, so I continued my education at a larger east coast university, and graduated with a fine arts degree, with a major in painting. At this point I would have been well prepared to serve in Leonardo da Vinci's studio. Although some things have changed since the Renaissance; fortunately the value of a good education remains the same: learning to think and to love knowledge is the best preparation for any career.
This question, although it may appear simple, requires a complex answer. The entire ALS consists of the linac, the booster ring, the storage ring, and the beamlines on the experiment floor. Although all of these elements are connected, each of them has an integrity which can be, and in fact is, measured separately. The reason for this is time. Surveying is a labor-intensive process, and in order to survey any element of the ALS within the shielding walls (i.e. linac, booster, or storage ring), the machine must be turned off. The time it would take to survey all the elements of the ALS consecutively would require that the machine be turned off for such a long time that the researchers would all give up and go home.
Seriously though, this is a genuine concern, and much careful consideration is given to balancing the needs of the researchers for "beamtime" against the needs of the ALS staff to maintain the machine at optimum efficiency. For this reason, a period of time is scheduled at about yearly intervals during which the machine is shut down for tasks such as survey and alignment and installation of equipment such as new undulators. These shutdowns typically last four to six weeks, and this provides us enough time to survey the storage ring, and to complete the installation of new components in the ring. Elements other than the storage ring are surveyed on an "as needed" basis, and in order to help track floor movement, the monuments in the storage ring are surveyed monthly.
In order for the ALS to grow and progress, new beamlines must be planned and installed. When this Web page was first created, I was working on the installation of pedestals for the protein crystallography Beamline, 5.0. Now, components are mounted on those pedestals, and they each require alignment. This beamline contains some particularly complex components, so the alignment tasks are more demanding. This adds to the challenge and is another illustration of why survey and alignment work will never get stale!