Christie Anastasia
COA was a transformative experience for me. I grew up in a concrete city and always longed for wide-open spaces. Finding COA was a gift; the school, the community, the landscape, and the atmosphere were perfect fits for what I needed to hone in on my passions and construct my future.
I very frequently used the setting of Acadia National Park as a place to contemplate, think, and rethink whatever I was experiencing in my COA courses. If I had a paper to write, and I had to craft my response, a long bike ride or hike in the park cleared my mind and provided focus. The healing power of nature was a necessary complement to my learning to think like a human ecologist.
The heart of COA’s educational approach is learning how to process so many disconnected pieces into a connected whole. As a partnership coordinator for the National Park Service, I am constantly strategizing the broader system. I very frequently get calls from the parks I oversee and I am perceived as a problem solver within the context of complex partnerships that follow the law and the policies. Nudging something to the right or the left can take something technically unallowable and push it to be hugely successful. I enjoy the mental challenge, but I enjoy the outcomes of people being more connected to their national parks even more. I learned and absorbed that way of thinking at COA.