What do you members do for a living?

Bellabijou said:
Same here! I am also going into my senior year of high school. It’s neat to see other people my age with the same passion! I currently work at an ice cream shop :p. I hope to do something with the premed track in college and then become a Neonatologist working with premature babies!
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Nice that sounds like an interesting job to look into, I worked at a hardware store over the summer but since this is my last year of high school I'm taking it easy until I graduate but yes it is nice to know there is others around the same age range as I.:ROFLMAO:
 
These are "402's", and they do have an orientation, and they are resistors and capacitors. Ah the days of using titanium tweezers under a microscope...

Little Bits.jpg
 
aguallo123 said:
What influenced you to want to work in a wildlife setting and are there any helpful hints as to what to do when going into the wildlife biology field? I only ask because I am getting close to obtaining my bachelors degree in biology-with concentration in zoology, and I want to be ready for the job opportunities and challenges I will face.
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Now THAT'S a very long story. I was always a kid who was fascinated by wild things (my mother learned the sad lesson of not letting me back into the house without going through my pockets first...always bringing home treasures; alive or dead). But I hated the school-age hard sciences and math and avoided them like the plague. Started off toward a career in illustration, literature/journalism, and philosophy. In my sophomore year in college went through a rather odd epiphany, reversed course and headed into conservation in order to work with wildlife. It was the conservation of wild lands that was really the thing that mattered to me. Illustration and writing turned out to be tools to FURTHER that bigger desire.

I can tell you that textbook, theoretical, and lab-based biology won't lead you into wildlife biology work on its own. They form baselines of understanding, but the "real" world of management takes so much more. You'll need exposure to physical reality...more than coursework can give you. It really ends up being management of human behavior, human desires, human-caused destruction of the planet; driven by politics, industry, greed, and ambition. Almost all of the jobs will be in taxpayer-funded public agencies. The entry level type jobs will be physical and pretty labor/trade focused, not intellectual. They are going to look for candidates that have actually WORKED on the land; know how to survey it, manipulate it, measure or observe it, and who can tolerate not having the biological or physical data to predict outcomes. Students often assume more and more advanced degrees make the difference. Not necessarily. A stellar PhD who's never operated a tractor or backhoe isn't any more useful to an agency district manager. Truly "pure" science type research will help, but the reality is that it's only one part of a profession like this.

They also want people who have worked with the public, can communicate in writing, communicate in group settings, can understand and apply a myriad of public laws and regulations. People who have boots-on-the-ground experience. Get that by volunteering, internships, getting involved with local conservation groups or public agencies. Read public case law. Get involved in local conservation decisionmaking processes, and realize that even though you might know technically what's right and what's wrong about some management decision, very few people will agree with you unless you are open to compromise. Getting all radical on principle won't get you very far either. Most governmental agency attitudes change pretty slowly because of political stubbornness and stupidity. Get some experience with political science and public administration too. The sad fact is that many of the conservation and public resource protection policies and decisions are made because of that, not the science. When I started out in this field coursework like that didn't exist. Take advantage of what now does.

Also realize that there are few employers and lots of candidates. They can be extremely picky. They are also slaves to taxpayer funding and legislative game playing. If the agencies don't have the budget because their goals aren't fiscally popular, they won't be hiring anyone. These days there are private consulting firms that take on the environmental monitoring necessary for private business to comply with law and regulation. They need trained and experienced biologists too. Get skills in air quality, water quality, soils, wetland, forest, range conditions, vegetation, chemical contaminant, and meteorological measurement so you can walk into the field and assess the conditions on a piece of property before it gets bulldozed or preserved.
 
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