2010 to 2014: A Summary

Perhaps we haven't spoken in years and you would like some context for my current activities.  Here it is.

When I was three or four, I thought maybe I'd like to be an astronaut.  Then I figured that if the discomfort my ear canals experienced with the pressure change on airplanes was any indication, space travel must be excruciating.  So I rejected that possible future, and afterwards was always a little bewildered when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Being grown up seemed like a very faraway state.  With all the time in between, how was I supposed to know what I'd want to be doing when I got there?

I didn't give the question much more thought until senior year of college, when I realized that grown-up was rapidly approaching.  I spent the following year mulling it over while hanging out with third-graders in the Minnesota Reading Corps and reading my way through the Minneapolis Public Library's nature section.  With the help of books like Song of the Dodo and Listening to Whales, I discovered that biology is full of intricate analytical puzzles and that it is possible to make a career out of studying nature where it lives.  When you combine these things you get something like field ecology, and that is what I want to do.  Some people do this work at universities; others for government agencies or consulting firms.  I haven't made any definite decisions about my preferences at that level of detail.  But I know I want to put math and fieldwork together to understand some part of how nature is organized.

Since then, I've done a lot of things: none of them for very long, but all of them in pursuit of this newfound goal or else to support myself along the way.  I've been very fortunate in the number of grand adventures that have been part of the process:

• The Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary in northern Minnesota, where I got very cozy with black bears and learned to love working outside. 
• Chasing Black-throated Blue Warblers around the woods in Vermont.
• Friday Harbor Labs in Washington state, where I learned about Pelagic Ecosystem Function and how to be a scientist.   
• A spring (or Minnesota winter) at Tall Timbers Research Station near Tallahassee, spying on Brown-headed Nuthatches.  
• And now a summer as a biological volunteer at Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, where I count seabirds and get to help out with all sorts of other cool projects.  (More about this to come.)  
  
  
  

Writing this all down is a little uncomfortable; in a way, I'm embarrassed at the extravagance of my good fortune.  But it also reminds me of my excitement at having found this way to be useful in the world, and my gratitude for the freedom and opportunity to pursue it.  It makes me commit again to work hard, to use my resources and my energy and the experience I have been given to help our species understand its habitat a little bit better.  So I'll get over the self-consciousness already and get back to work.