Realizing the Value of My University of Wisconsin Education
During my time at the University of Wisconsin, I didn't realize how special it was. I didn't realize what a "prestigious" university it was. I just went there. Because when you're from Wisconsin, that's what you do. Or that's what I thought. I didn't feel particularly privileged. I didn't feel particularly brilliant. In fact, I felt quite the opposite. I felt, at first anyway, like I was always the person in class that was one step behind. People would ask questions about things that I hadn't even begun thinking about thinking about. I just didn't have the brilliant mind that it took to be an all-star at that institution. And then I found my niche. The Department of Wildlife Ecology. The very same department founded by Mr. Aldo Leopold in 1933. I still didn't know how special that was. I still didn't feel particularly privileged. I still didn't feel particularly brilliant. But at least I GOT it. At least I finally had fun learning what I was learning.
I'm going to jump forward to my recent life. My "professional" life. Life after UW. I remember when I changed my major to wildlife ecology and environmental studies in the middle of my Junior year (even though I swore for years before starting school that I would NEVER be one of those x% of people that change their major), my dad said to me...."you're never going to get a job in that field." And I get (now) where he was coming from. It's not easy. It's not explainable. You don't just walk into a major corporation and say "I'm an ecologist, give me a job". But, as I have always been wont to do, I took my father's words as a challenge. I took them. And I proved him wrong.
Immediately after finishing my degree, I spent a summer restoring 4 prairies within 40 miles of Madison, WI. A hot summer. A hot, dry summer. It was hard work. It was miserable. I hated it much of the time. But I was out on the land. I learned to identify more prairie plants (and weeds) than I ever had in a classroom. I learned to recognize the calls of more birds than I'd ever retained from sitting in an ornithology lab. And THAT knowledge is what has stayed with me. I've forgotten more than I've ever known about identifying taxa.....unless it's native to the prairies of south central Wisconsin. Those, I will remember for the rest of my life. I was surrounded by them. I was immersed in them.
After my gig trying to gain back what we'd lost in Wisconsin, I moved on to graduate school. Not in Wildlife Ecology as so many, but in Geographic Information Systems. You see....I'd once taken a class by a brilliant professor at UW (whose office was shoved off into the corner of some building on the far west end of campus that I had to look up the location of 3 times just to make sure it actually existed), and he once gave me these brilliant words about the University system. [The University inherently puts you into a niche. You come in here, maybe not knowing what you want to learn, and they make you pick a major. A track of focus. And then within that major they make you pick a specialization...science, natural resources, international studies, whatever. But, at least you still have options. You can still spend the credits and take a class in whatever sounds interesting to you, so long as you complete your major requirements in a timely fashion they don't really care what you learn. But, now, they tell you that in order to get a job, you have to get a masters degree. And so, within your major, you pick something specific to study. And you research that. So, even though you've got a masters in whatever, you really only know a little bit about the rest of that discipline and a lot about this area of it. And then, God forbid you get a PhD. And now you know a whole lot about one thing and not a lot about anything else.] His point was that we need to break away from this thinking and learn about the whole system. It's great that you've got a post-graduate degree studying this particular organism in this tiny patch of habitat, but what about the rest? What about all the factors that affect that habitat? What about all the things that organism and that habitat affect? When someone comes to fix the heating system in your house, there's not a guy who knows everything about how THIS KNOB right here works and has to call 3 other people about the other knobs who then have to call 3 other people about the pipes in-between. Why should we do that with higher education? So, I studied GIS. And when I had my interview for grad school admission, one of the questions I had to answer was, why do you want to learn GIS. My answer was as follows: "I want to learn GIS because I'm an ecologist. But I don't want to be an ecologist that spends her entire life managing for this species or this taxa. I want to be an ecologist that finds the places where species can live on the landscape and tells the managers those locations." And that, my friends, has been my job ever since I finished grad school (and even before). Heck....that's what I did for my final project in grad school. And I've never looked back. And I will never look back.
Why is this all important right now? Well. At the conference I'm attending this week we had a keynote speaker this morning. She's from a university in Iowa. She spent a lot of time talking about the issues and failures and complications in educating conservation students. She spoke a lot about how with biology students, all the money is in the medical field. No one wants to learn ecology. And those that do have a disconnect with the real world of ecology. It's true, I suppose. All the universities want research...it's what funds them these days. During her talk, she spoke a lot about Aldo Leopold and his revolutionary approaches to ecology education and wildlife and landscape management. She spoke about how students these days take one or two undergraduate ecology courses, almost none of them lab courses. She spoke about how graduate students sort of do all this research on something and then don't know how to push it through to policy or don't go out on the land and actually implement their research. She spoke about how scientists and ecologists have brilliant minds for research and produce brilliant things, but then don't know how to behave in meetings or communicate their findings to the general public in a manner that they can be understood. As she spoke, it dawned on me once again that my education at UW WAS unique. It WAS special. I wasn't a "biology" major. I was a WILDLIFE ECOLOGY major. I was an ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES major. My courses were taught by professors that were working in the real world as well as in their offices. Our department chairman taught all of us from the beginning that the most important skill we could learn was communication with farmers and hunters. He taught us ignorant city kids a hunter education course and took us hunting with his own dog so that we could have an experience that allowed us to relate to hunters. I took classes that REQUIRED me to be there at 7am so we could go look at birds. I took classes that had field components at some of the many natural areas right on our campus. I took classes that MADE me understand how these systems function in the real world. I took classes on the history of environmental policy in the US. I took Agricultural and Applied Economics to get an understanding of the economics behind farming vs. environmental issues. I could keep going, but this post has already gotten out of hand. Bottom line......I realized this morning just how lucky I was to have attended one of the GREATEST institutions in the United States.
Environmental educators out there.....you're looking to solve the problem of the education gap. I know that there are politics and policy standing in the way of everything, but I'm here to say that fixing the problems in conservation education today is NOT an insurmountable challenge. I'm here to say.......ON WISCONSIN!
