Class Year

16

Job and Employer

Botanist

Work:

At the moment, I am a bit of an itinerant botanist. I just finished a summer of fieldwork (working for Colorado State University) that brought me to Texas, Mississippi, and Florida for vegetation mapping; I then spent the first part of the autumn surveying grasslands in eastern Colorado. Now I am headed to Michigan, and then to California, to work on couple of lichen ecology projects with which I became involved while I was at COA.

I am also currently applying to graduate schools, looking at programs in evolutionary biology.  

Senior project:

The serpentine biota of Massachusetts: Documenting the plants and lichens of serpentinite outcrops in western Massachusetts

Internship:

John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Davis; The Field Museum of Natural History

Human ecology in action:

I wrote my human ecology essay about specialization with humility, the idea that it’s okay to specialize in one discipline (I certainly do) as long as one recognizes that a single discipline has neither all the answers nor all the questions. Even though my current work and future plans are heavily oriented towards ecology and evolutionary biology, I do my best to uphold this idea in my interactions and collaborations with other people.