Jason, I'm also 45, with a Master's, and have worked in ecology/conservation for long time. I also decided to re-enroll in grad school last year for a PhD, 20 years after getting that Master's. As perhaps Earth's only Harvard/UC Riverside alum (BA/MSc, resp.), I'll second what Mike Ellis (Ecuador NGO dir.) said about studying 'below your weight', and most of his other points too.
Ok, by "success", you state that you'd like to live in the tropics (let's say full-time) and contribute to conservation through research in some way. You cite Goodall, etc. as role models. I'm still unclear on what your actual skills are, so I'd start with that. - What do you do better than anyone else? - Who are the people that say, "I know, we gotta call Jason Hernandez to figure this one out"? - If I found $10K for you tomorrow, how would you spend it, and would I be pleased with the results? - How could you save an NGO money, or get them some funding, and how would you go about this? These are hard questions if you're just starting out, since you don't know how anything works. But these should be easy for someone working in the field for a couple decades. I get that making money in conservation is a slog, and always has been. I worked lots of unpaid/low- paid field tech jobs up until grad school, then was a program director at Audubon for five years (after cold-calling them to see if they needed someone to do a management plan for one of their sanctuaries, which to my surprise they did). Then I quit and started my own ecological consulting business after getting to know the landscape, assembling mentors, and picking up a few survey contracts. I haven't saved a dime and I've been at it for 20 years, but it pays the bills, and supports my family, etc., so I don't think I'm a "failure". In some ways, I'm your version of success, living where I want, doing research here and there on topics that interest me, fighting conservation battles I get called into. To me your plan needs fleshing-out. Is there an area of the tropics that interests you? (it's a big place) Do you have contacts anywhere, and have you impressed anyone down there? I think for a long time, I romanticized working in the tropics. As an undergrad, I'd read about Ted Parker and Al Gentry, and think - you could get PAID for doing that? But realistically, the people who get paid to record bird songs and collect plants in remote areas aren't JUST doing that every day. They're raising money, writing papers, prepping specimens, analyzing genomic data, teaching courses - you know, the 'work' part! Someone hired them for specific skills, so just living in the tropics without institutional backing doesn't sound like a really viable path - unless you have some independent funding source in mind. I'd have a base and a job up here and just pick an area down there to return to, and really get to know it. I need to wrap this up, and I'll do so with this analogy I tell students who ask...let's say you want to work in conservation and focus on salmon conservation. That's great. Now, do you want to hike around in a wetsuit and do snorkeling surveys? Do you want to monitor catches for a federal agency and develop strategic plans? Do you want to analyze spawning data and publish the results? Do you want to design the tanks and hatchery equipment that keep them alive in captivity? Work with consultants to write legislation and pester electeds? Design education materials and teach a bunch of kids? And on and on. Now, swap "salmon" for anything else, and you'll see these jobs are really similar across subjects, and require similar skills. But it's a good idea to just pick one of these trajectories and work along it, or at least try to return to it after being away. And after c. 10,000 hours, hey, you'll be an expert! Dan Cooper www.cooperecological.com UCLA-EEB (PhD student)
