I never thought I’d end up where I am, working on my PhD in ecology. As a kid, I didn’t even know what that meant. Sure, I knew about herpetology and marine biology and entomology but those were buzzwords used by the cool folks in Time for Kids or Zoobooks who were explorers, not employees. It never seemed like an actual job I could have.
Perhaps my favorite place as a kid was Brookfield Zoo. We got a lot of mileage out of our annual passes, and went even on days when the most exciting animals to see were the chipmunks and sparrows eating leftovers outside the food courts. We were frequently the only ones there bundled up in our snowsuits on dreary February days, which are actually some of the best times to see fascinating animal activity. I loved the intrigue of it, the suspense of never knowing what you were going to see or what the animals would be up to on a given visit. Ironically enough given the diversity of amazing animals at the establishment, my favorite animal in the whole place was Katie Rose, the Holstein heifer who lived in the Red Barn at the Children’s Zoo. Her pen smelled like a farm in the best ways. There’s something about the mix of slightly rotting hay and warmth that tickled my nose, and her gentle muzzle was velvety soft. Overall the sensory experience of being in her private corner of the barn was tantalizing. Eventually I outgrew the frequent zoo trips and had to think seriously—or at least as seriously as a self-absorbed teen can—about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew I didn’t want to be a medical doctor, so I made it through my required science classes and left it at that. I was decidedly an indoor kid in high school, but that was decided for me because that’s where things happened. Classes never went outside, my sports teams were indoor functions, and orchestra was a temperature-sensitive hobby. Sure, I spent my summers working outdoors at a phenomenal summer camp situated on 650 acres of hardwood forest and Illinois prairie, but when it was time to come inside in August, that was it. I’d see the sun again when the days got longer in the spring. I started college as an architecture major. I hated it. Within two weeks I was in the Dean’s office figuring out how to change my major. And, after some soul searching, I decided that I wanted to be a veterinarian. Why? Because I loved animals. I thought of those trips to the zoo and that was the only route I could envision taking to end up back there. So, at the University of Illinois, I was faced with another choice, Animal Sciences or Integrative Biology. I met with both sets of advisors, talked with several professors in the department, and decided that at an agricultural school, the AnSci department seemed like a better fit, retrospectively because their classes seemed to deal with actual animals, not biological concepts. They worked closely with the vet school and the farms and it seemed ideal. So that’s what I did. I expected more time snuggling cute puppies than actually came to fruition; but overall, I had more animal handling experience in my college career than I would have in the Architecture Department. I even learned how to shear a sheep! The fact that I talk about these life events like they happened to me rather than conscious choices is not a coincidence. In many ways that’s how it felt. I was raised in a world where you took opportunities that presented themselves and didn’t search out ones that went beyond the pale. I have some speculation about why that is. In my mind, it’s because I was raised by middle class Baby Boomers. My parents come from a generation where you chose which good (union) job you were going to pursue, got an education or vocational training to match that, worked for 35 years, and retired with a pension. It wasn’t all about upward mobility, creative thinking, or even professional fulfillment. It was about getting a good, steady job that could fund the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence. With their needs met, they assured their children that they could be whatever they wanted when they grew up, but didn’t really emphasize the soul-searching required for personal fulfillment or a non-traditional career requires. While my mom did a great job of trying to encourage me to pursue my passions in short-term experiences like day trips to the zoo, there was never any discussion of how to build towards a career. Maybe she trusted that I would figure it out on my own, but most of the time growing up—and sometimes even still—it felt like by the seat of my pants. In the middle of my junior year when I figured out that veterinary school was not going to be a good fit. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a hard choice; there were lots of signs. I literally passed out on the floor of the operating room the first time I watched a cat get spayed. It wasn’t bloody or smelly, it was just not something I could handle. It’s a symptom of what my mom affectionately calls my Princess Quotient. I came to on the floor of the operating room, mortified and traumatized, and I never went back to shadow the operating room again, even though I had . I also had the putrid pleasure of being in a lab where we unwittingly dissected the fallopian tube of a sow that had reabsorbed a piglet. In case you can’t imagine what that’s like on your own, it was a fairly large sac filled with liquefied piglet and some rotten bones. The smell still haunts me. There were some fun classes. I was pretty good at shearing sheep and candling eggs, and I always enjoyed a good trip to the dairy farms, but as someone who was absolutely never going to be a farmer, it was more fun than functional. (Mad props to farmers though, that work is hard!) It was a trip to Thailand to work at the vet’s office at the renowned Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai that finally helped me articulate my interests. After spending two weeks staring in awe at the elephants and learning all I could about how ENP works within the social structures of Thailand to help preserve and protect these creatures and their habitat, I was captivated by the interactions between wildlife and humans, and for the first time started thinking academically about the role that we play in the desecration or preservation of our planet. Turns out, what I had been interested in all along was wildlife conservation. It was a clarifying moment, and I’ve met several other young ecologists (all female) who came to similar realizations towards the end of their Animal Science degrees. So, I didn’t apply to veterinary school. I applied for a few PhD programs straight out of undergrad, and didn’t get into any of them, and was forced to come up with a backup plan. It wasn’t the most welcoming launch into the post-grad world. With an animal sciences degree, I suddenly felt unqualified for anything remotely related to what I now thought I wanted to do. I applied for a few jobs at animal shelters and was heavily recruited for one, not only was the pay terrible, the idea of working for a high-kill shelter depressed me. I could put on a brave face to talk about it an interview, but I knew that when the time came that I had to be involved in a euthanasia that I would never be back. The Student Conservation Association came through for me—I’ll talk about them in another post, they’ve been so influential in my career path—and I decided that maybe it was time to get back to what I loved, which was working at the zoo. In January of 2012, I took an unpaid internship in the Education, School Group, and Teacher Programs department at Brookfield Zoo. I worked closely with a team of dedicated educators to develop curriculum for field trip groups that came to the zoo and build experiences for beyond the classroom. For the most part, it was great. I liked the people I was working with and I was good at the work I did, but again, something didn’t jive. I was only there for twelve weeks, but I realized quickly that some of the kids who came to the zoo were leaving without seeing a live animal. They were bussed into our parking lot, filed into our classroom, did their inquiry-driven learning (which is actually the Scientific Method in action—again, I digress), and left. At an establishment that is consistently ranked in the Top Ten Zoos and Aquariums in the country, we weren’t letting our students experience or connect with the amazing animals in residence, and I found that appalling. Of course, as an intern, it wasn’t something I could file a complaint about, but I knew I didn’t want to apply for a position that continued my involvement in that department. But, I had a hard-earned foot in the door, and the zoo was still my favorite place, so I had them recommend me for another position. I started that summer as a Roving Naturalist—one of the staff who gives the chats and lets visitors pet the snakes and overall presents valuable educational programming to supplement guests’ zoo visits. It seemed like my dream job, and in many ways maybe it was. I worked with a group of smart and passionate people, and really got pretty good at giving informational talks for the general public. But there were also a lot of issues with the job. For one, the nepotism at Brookfield Zoo is insane. I, with a degree in animal sciences and a true passion for the job, worked my network to its fullest in order to even get an interview while others who had no background in the field (and frankly weren’t very good at their jobs) got hired solely based on family relations. The pay was also crap. I made much less than the food service staff or the camp counselors, and had to know a lot more about the actual animals, which at the time I believed to be the true mission of the zoo. That was naïve of me; they’re an entertainment venue, which happens to have a conservation theme. But most of all, I found the hypocrisy to be untenable. When an institution claims that it is dedicated to conserving and restoring biodiversity worldwide, but sells landfill fodder souvenirs and plastic water bottles in their gift shops, I cannot condone their business ethic or the fundraising methodology. The argument of course is that they can’t afford to feed the animals if they don’t sell plush toys and tee shirts made in China, but there are ways to walk the walk and lead by example. For instance, selling goods manufactured in the USA, using fair-trade and recycled materials, installing compost facilities, and encouraging the use of reusable water bottles are systematic changes that actually benefit wildlife worldwide. News flash: providing compostable forks and spoons doesn’t do any good if there aren’t compost bins in which to dispose of them. It ended up being too hypocritical for me to wrestle with and I resigned in the middle of summer 2013. This is going to sound presumptuous and insolent, but I will stand by it 100%. It’s hard to be smarter than your boss. It’s incredibly difficult to work within the box of a large organization that doesn’t give you a chance to be creative in your approach and passionate in your execution. By the time I quit at the zoo, I had started my Master’s at DePaul and was in the middle of my first foray into ecological research. I had applied to get a master’s because I felt like I had to, and why not go for a subject related to my bachelors, but moving in a less farm-y, vet-y direction. And so, finally and almost accidentally, I had stumbled into something that was environmentally motivated and empirically minded. And best of all, it was almost entirely self-driven. I had responsibilities and the expectations were high, but I was finally given the flexibility to figure out how to meet those goals myself. For the first time since exploring at the zoo as a kid and settling into my favorite corner of the Red Barn with Katie Rose the cow, conducting ecology research afforded me the opportunity to figure out exactly what my interest were and develop a plan to pursue them. Sometimes certain questions or experiments or analyses are dead ends; there are always going to be days when the most exciting thing happening is the sparrows foraging at the picnic area. But I suppose if I extend the metaphor, ecology is the only field that hasn’t excluded me for being intrigued by those types of mundane happenings. In fact, there are researchers in my department who study that very behavior. And so, here I am. I’ve tested the waters along the way and have more so eliminated career paths that didn’t work for me than I have deliberately pursued a path. And maybe that’s strange, but maybe that’s what an academic career is about. It’s about having the foundational knowledge and the opportunities to stretch your brain in different directions and figure out which one sparks the fire.
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January 2024
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