Why I Chose A Forestry Management Career

Video Transcript

Host Question:
Why did you choose to study environmental management?

Guest Answer:
I’ve always been an outdoorsy guy. I’ve always cared about the environment. I grew up hunting, fishing, hiking. I just love being outside. And I was always drawn to the idea of like, OK, can I get a job and a career where I can protect the things that I care about and enjoy every day? You know, as a high school kid, like, what does that mean? And I started learning about environmental science, environmental management, and at the time, I was researching college, I was like, oh, this is a growing industry. And so I was like, all right, let’s get my environmental science degree and then go from there.

Guest Answer:
I guess when I was little. You know, I always watch like the shows with Steve Irwin, Jack Hanna, Jeff Corwin, and I love seeing them interact with animals and nature. And naturally, I’m such a quiet and introverted person. I’ve always had a strong connection to animals. And it was this love and and deep respect for animals that always drove me to want to do something to help them in the Earth.

Guest Answer:
So agriculture has always been a passion of mine. And I grew up in a small town outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I showed livestock. I competed in speaking events. And then when I started to look at colleges, I realized that I could get a scholarship and did actually receive one to go to a junior college and collegiately just livestock there. From there I went to a different University that transferred my credits in and I actually started speech and language pathology and very quickly learned that was not my fit. I don’t know what it was. It just that’s just not what my niche was. That’s not what my passion was. And so when I found the agriculture department at that given university, I fell in love.

Guest Answer:
So I fell into it. I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian. I was studying biology in college with the hopes of going to that school, but I discovered that I really enjoyed the more ecological and outdoors and more macro level courses that I was taking that focused on forests and different biomes and systems, rather than the more micro classes such as dissection or study of viruses or anything like that. And I just really enjoyed the outside portion of my education. So I decided to focus more on the electives that would lead me to having a concentration of my biology degree in natural resource management. And I started taking several seasonal jobs that led me to different states such as South Dakota and Idaho and Utah doing different habitat, wildlife and forest technician positions. And that led me into where I am now in Utah, where I’ve stayed a couple of years now, deciding to pursue a job as a wildland firefighter for two seasons now.

Guest Answer:
I chose my major because I was raised on a farm and I initially wanted to be a college farmer and I decided to use my degree. That way I could learn the best business practices to be able to have a forum of my own. However, while in school, I learned a lot of economic policies and government policies that affected my life and every farmer and rancher and any person that honestly works for the environment. It and I decided to change from wanting to be a farmer, to actually wanting to work with research and to be able to produce Economic Research that would benefit farmers and ranchers and anybody in agriculture and/or environment in general.

Guest Answer:
I’ve always been interested in nature and just being outdoors in general, always had an interest in plants and animals going into college and late in high school, I thought I was going to be a biology major and go into genetics or a similar field, and that did enough lab work to realize I would feel a little bit less interested in that path than I thought. So I ended up pursuing my degree in environmental studies. It was a little more wide ranging. I really appreciated just the many different aspects to it that I could take for resource economics classes that I did sociology classes, history classes, biology classes, chemistry classes and are all under the same umbrella. That interdisciplinary nature really appealed to me. And just the fact that could lead to a career where I spent most of my time working outside was also very appealing.