Minuteman Regional High School graduate Matthew Lowry, or Matt as he likes to be called, is a man who believes in the benefits of practical knowledge, and who likes to work with his hands.
Throughout his work career, he has been adept at rolling with the punches, thanks in part to the skills he learned at Minuteman in the early 1980s. Over the years, he has worked in several different fields, including forestry, Computer Aided Drafting (CAD), and land surveying.
Matt, who enrolled at Minuteman in 1979, and graduated in 1983, found a focus for his life at the school.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t plan to go to college, and I didn’t really want to go to high school for that matter,” he said of his early adolescent years. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. “Then, I went to Minuteman, and I discovered the Landscape Management program,” he said. “I really enjoyed it, and so I decided to do that.”
The program of studies at Minuteman made Matt look forward to going to school, and taught him many things that would benefit him later in life. “It really challenged me in different ways than just the academics,” Matt said of his experience at Minuteman. “My instructor brought out common sense in students, and developed it.
“We did pretty much everything,” he said. “If a vehicle needed to be fixed, he’d have us fix it. If tools needed to be maintained or sharpened, we would do that. We’d take things apart, and he’d show us how they worked. He really got us thinking in different ways about everything around us.”
Not only did Matt pick up usable skills, including safety skills, on campus at Minuteman, he also got a taste of what it was like to work in the real world.
“We started a tree service where we would go out and do tree work like a regular tree company,” Matt said. “If people in the community needed some tree work done, we would go out and do it. We had a bus we’d load everything up on, we had a chipper, and we’d go out and have labs at people’s houses.
“We climbed trees, and we used chain saws,” he said. “We’d take trees down, cut them up, and clean up the place. We’d leave things the way they were when we arrived.”
As Matt entered his senior year at Minuteman, he found to his surprise that he wanted to continue his education. He applied to and was accepted at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks of Northern New York. He graduated from that college in 1985 with an Associates Degree in Forestry Land Surveying.
While he was in college, Matt found his Minuteman education, with the emphasis it placed on academics as well as vocational training, served him well.
“A lot of the skills I learned at Minuteman were duplicated in college,” he said. “My high school experience involved a lot of practical and hands on work, and when I got to Paul Smith, they pretty much went over the same course curriculum. “What we had been doing at the high school was actually pretty advanced,” he said. “I was well prepared for the work I had to do at Paul Smith’s.”
Matt, who is now 42 years old, currently works as a land surveyor at Design Consultants in Somerville. He is a professional member of the Massachusetts Association of Land Surveyors and Civil Engineers (MALSCE). “We do residential and commercial land surveying, measuring people’s houses and the terrain of the surrounding area,” he said. “We put it all on CAD, and we make digital maps out of it.”
Prior to working at Design Consultants, Matt worked at a landscaping company, an environmental engineering firm doing CAD work, and at another land surveying company. As the job market and his work environment have changed, one thing has been a constant.
“A few times I’ve gone back to my core high school education, and used that to stabilize my work career,” he said. “It gave me something to fall back on. We did so many things there that I feel, if anything ever breaks, I won’t hesitate to tackle it and fix it. That’s what you need to do when you’re out in industry— keep things working.”
Matt, who grew up in Arlington, now lives in Wakefield with his wife Elizabeth. The couple has a 8-year-old daughter, and an old house in constant need of repair. However, Matt wouldn’t have it any other way.
"I definitely look forward to having a challenge,” he said. “I like to work on my house. I always have something to do every weekend, like patching holes, or fixing something. “I still change my own oil, and work on my cars as much as possible,” he added.
Whether Matt is at work doing land surveying, or at home working on his house or car, it’s clear the skills he learned at Minuteman are serving him well 20 years after his graduation.
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