What Should Anyone Considering Environmental / Forestry Management Should Know?

Video Transcript

What is something. Every person considering studying environmental management should know about the career before they jump in. So environmental is a weird gambit. It’s both very broad and very specific. Something I would look into is what do you actually want to do? Because there’s so many different paths and it’s kind of overwhelming. But at the same time, all of these broad things require specific skill sets. So I think the most helpful thing is, as you’re especially, it’s been like freshman, sophomore year, really start thinking, OK, what direction I want to go in land internships. You have to really ask yourself, am I OK with maybe spending quite a few years beginning my career, moving around? A lot of these jobs are seasonal, so you need to make sure that you’re able to be somewhat mobile because you may not be able to get a permanent job right where you are. So be able to move around and get experience is definitely something that you have to consider if you are able and willing to do. Also, a lot of times any jobs, whether that’s logging, timber management, fire range management, you do need a couple of years of on the ground experience. And a lot of that is outdoors. So do you really enjoy might think you like being outside, but what if you’re camping for two weeks straight and you’re working on a fire and you’re tired and you smell like smoke and you can’t shower and you just have to keep doing what you’re doing. And are you going to be able to, like, mentally handle that? And then are you OK with low on the ladder for a little while and having to just take orders from people because they’re the ones in charge? If you can just remember on the bad days that what you’re passionate about is something you actually get to do and that you are making a difference and you get to be paid to be outside, which a lot of people do. Like if you can keep that in your head when you’re having not the greatest day or the greatest week or assignment, or even with the job that you don’t like, just remembering why you’re there. And that one job doesn’t represent the whole of your career. And you always move on. My best suggestion is that you have a true passion for it because you will be judged for it and you won’t get paid necessarily what you want. So making sure that you have a true passion before choosing an agriculture industry is of the utmost importance. You should try to make yourself as aware as possible of the diversity of options out there available to you. My first couple of years in college, I knew very little about the Foreign Service at all and very little about forestry or forest management at all. I really ended up going down this path Thanks to an internship with the student conservation association, where I worked as a interpretive Ranger for a summer. We got to work with other departments within the forest service, and I really enjoyed working with the timber department. The environmental studies environmental management field is a really broad one. You can be a historian or a sociologist or a mathematician or an ecologist, and it all falls under that umbrella. Make yourself aware of everything that’s out there and do some exploring. There are some degrees like agriculture and forestry engineering that yeah, they do make a lot of money, but it’s very hard work. You need to love what you do. I would say that for honestly any major. But in these fields specifically, you need to love what you do because yeah, the money is worth it, but it is strenuous work. I’m sure you hear it right now, just disheartening news about the environment, about the Earth. And sometimes that can make you have doubts that you’ll be able to even make an impact or make a change. But no matter how big or small of a role you take during school and after, you will have made an impact. Just learning about the environment, forestry management, it’ll have a huge impact just on how you look at the earth, how you interact with it, and even those around you like with me SINGING My friends and family know that I’ve studied. They come to me to ask for, like, help. Like how can they be, like, environmentally responsible?