It's hard to say that I've made a career out of ecology yet, since I'm only 30, but I'll chime in with my experience in response to Asia's post.
TL;DR: You don't have to have a continuous sequence of jobs in ecology/conservation in order to have a career in these fields. There are plenty of jobs in somewhat related fields that won't look weird on your CV, pay better, and give you useful skills for future job or school applications in ecology/conservation. Also, there are plenty of success stories to be seen outside of this listserv: look at the CVs of the people whose jobs you want. Email them and ask about their career path if they don't have a CV available online. As with any "survey", asking for responses on a listserv yields a biased sample that may not be super applicable to individual situations. I am a restoration and conservation ecologist using the native bee community as my study system. How I got here: I knew in college that I wanted to pursue a career as an ecologist, and especially that I wanted to learn to be a field researcher and educator, i.e. I knew that I wanted to go to grad school at some point. But, I didn't know how to narrow down my broad interests to choose my next step in ecology. So, when I graduated in 2010, I worked for a year as an entry-level employee at an environmental consulting firm. This was a fantastic decision for me: I had a salary that let me live comfortably in DC, save some money, have health insurance, and I gained some great technical writing skills. During that year, I read a lot in my free time: some ecology and entomology textbooks, popular science books, and a bunch of journal articles that I got access to by emailing friends who were still in school. I also volunteered a couple of hours a week in the Coleoptera collection at the Smithsonian Natural History museum - I just emailed one of the curators there, said I had a degree in biology, and would love to come do grunt work. By reading and interacting with academics at the museum, I was able to keep my feet wet and think about where I wanted to go. I quit my job in 2011 having saved money to buy a DSLR and go on a month-long roadtrip through the US Southwest, hitting some of the coolest ecological spots in the US (Big Bend, the sky islands of Arizona, Rocky Mountain Biological Station). I then moved to New Jersey with my partner where I worked for a few months at an hourly wage selling solar power for a major residential solar company. I was already pretty good at public speaking, but I definitely picked up a fluidity and responsiveness to audience during this job that has come in really useful as an educator. Then I was able to use my entomology knowledge, research experience as an undergrad, and tiny amount of research experience at the Smithsonian to get a paid job as a research technician in the pollination ecology lab at Rutgers....where I ended up starting as a PhD student in 2012, first on a fellowship and then as a TA. My PI has said explicitly that my work experience outside of ecology gave me a competitive edge when I applied to do a PhD with her: my performance review and references from my consulting job were excellent, and my adviser was less interested in people with extensive field tech experience and much more interested in someone with a proven ability to create finished products, make deadlines, and collaborate with co-workers on writing and analysis. I was fully funded for 6 years at a school where TAs are unionized (= livable salary & health insurance). I just defended in April and started a postdoc in May. My two main research projects during my PhD involved months of fieldwork at mid-elevation in the beautiful mountains of southwest Montana and in a wildflower-filled restored tallgrass prairie (with wild bison! and fire!). Basically, with a couple of short stints in non-ecology fields, I have been able to pursue a career in ecology and pay my bills. To digress a bit and step up to a soapbox, passion isn't fixed at 22 (or 30. Or 50. Or 75.). Our interests are constantly developing and it's a very rare person who has a single overriding passion and will be unhappy and unfulfilled if they don't do that one thing (e.g. a recent Atlantic article <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/find-your-passion-is-terrible-advice/564932/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20180712&silverid-ref=NDc1NTMxNzU5ODc4S0>, or scholarly work by Ann Renninger). From the sage position of a 30 year-old, I think the best thing anyone can do in their 20s is to try out several directions and just see where your interests develop. Ecology and conservation are enormous fields encompassing a huge variety of careers - try them out! For several years, I thought I was going to be a population geneticist working on conservation problems and took classes and did a research project toward that end. Then I got out of school and realized questions answered by population genetics aren't the ones that interest me (for this decade, anyway). Also, ecology/conservation is a highly-skilled field, and the salaried positions, both inside and outside academia, require strong writing and analytical skills. There's no getting around the need to acquire those skills and the most efficient ways to do that are through grad school or jobs that teach you those skills, and as everyone on this thread has discussed, the paid skill-building jobs are often in other fields. Spending a year or two in a different field won't kill your career in ecology/conservation, and, in addition to picking up useful skills, might give you the time to explore (through reading and/or volunteering) new areas of ecology/conservation, as it did for me. Just my two cents. :) Feel free to email me to continue the conversation. Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar, PhD Post-Doctoral Associate University of Minnesota Department of Entomology 1634 Gortner Ave. Falcon Heights, MN 55113 (443) 433-8262 bbruningasocolar.wordpress.com she/her/hers On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 12:05 PM, Asia Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > In June, I graduated from the University of California Davis with a B.S. > in Evolution, Ecology, and Biodiversity. I just want to express that even > in our own countries, it is hard to find work in conservation, or even > ecology in general. No one I know in my major has a job lined up in our > field yet--not even an interview. I did always dream of working in the > tropics and doing conservation, but I don't have the resources to do unpaid > work. I have been applying to conservation jobs in the United States, but > it is really hard to get into this field, even with years of experience in > labs and doing field work. I've been keeping up with this post and, > honestly, it is very disheartening. I had hoped to hear some of the paths > that people started at my age and how they had resulted in a career. This > hasn't been the case, though. > > Many of the other graduates I know need paid work. We are starting to want > to settle for jobs other than the ones we dreamed of. Many of us feel > undervalued as we have done unpaid work our entire undergraduate career on > top of working a normal job to pay our rent and thought that once we had a > degree, we would be paid for our services. We know that there are a lot of > people out there willing to work for free (we were those people because as > an undergraduate you don't have many options), but what message does that > send to future ecologists holding a bachelors, masters, or doctorate? It > tells us that our work is not worth paying for, therefore, it is > unimportant. If we can't make a living out of our dream, we will have to > stop following it. If people hear there is little chance of being able to > support yourself as a conservationist, how many future conservationists do > you think we will have? I'm not in this for the money, no one I know is, > but we have to make something to be able to continue working in this field > we love. > > If you do have success stories in ecology, in making a career out of it, > please do share. It gives those of us just starting out a little hope > > -Asia Jones > > On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 8:14 AM, Jason Hernandez < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Malcolm McCallum's reply was certainly thorough. But in response to his >> initial question, what do you mean by success, I should clarify. In my OP, >> I referred to unpaid, or even pay-to-play internships and positions in the >> tropics. What I meant by success, in that context, was: moving on from >> unpaid to paid, but still working in the tropics. >> >> We have examples like Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas, who made entire >> careers out of primatology research and conservation. They were backed by >> the Leakey Institute, and appeared to have been set on that path right from >> the time they were graduate students. Conversely, we have countless eager >> young people who would like to do something like that, but cannot break the >> barrier of unpaid work, so they end up "settling" (for lack of a better >> term) for conservation careers in their own countries. "Mitigating" >> wetlands for a strip mall developer can be a viable career; but would it be >> a satisfying one for someone who dreamed of saving rainforests? >> >> I appreciated the analysis from the Ecuador nonprofit. I knew immediately >> what organization that was, because I did one of those internships with >> them under their prior management. It was just as the new manager said: I >> paid to goof off in the forest and do a lackluster project. I appreciated >> his detailed story of how he got where he was. I also appreciated his >> candor in admitting that privilege was a factor. >> >> I am 45 years old. In the course of my adult life, I have switched >> careers several times, usually by necessity. Sometimes the reasons are >> clear and I can see my fault in them; other times, I still do not >> understand what happened. At this point, at 45 with an M.S., I have >> accepted that an academic or research career is not open to me. At this >> point, my goal is to get together enough resources to spend my retirement >> years in the tropics, doing ecology research in a small way that someone >> without an institutional lab can do. But I know that there are young people >> in school right now with the same dream I once had, and I posted that OP >> largely on their behalf. >> >> Thank you to everyone who replied. >> >> Jason Hernandez >> East Carolina alumnus >> > >
