Several months ago, I was approached by a friend of a friend from grad school. He is working as an undergraduate adviser at U.C. Davis and had noticed a prominent gap in the thinking of the undergraduates he was advising.
Most of the undergraduates who are pursuing a degree in biology are doing so with a view towards entering the human health fields. Be it a doctor, sports medicine consultant, pharmacist, or other related field a majority of the undergrads getting biology degrees are aiming for working with human health. Some of these undergrads had looked far and wide at the various careers open to them and had picked on of these fields, but many said that they were not really aware of any non-human health related careers that one could get into with a biology degree. So, this adviser decided to do something about that. He has been interviewing professionals in biology related careers but that have nothing directly to do with human health, and that is where I came into his view.
He and I met at a site a little south of West Sacramento and talked about what my job is like, how I got into it, and what I would suggest other people think about if they were interested in doing something similar. The video of the interview has just gone live on YouTube, and this is the link. Overall, I am pretty happy with how the video came out. I really wanted to show that a job working with the natural world could be fun and rewarding and worth looking into, and I think I did that fairly well. After watching the video a couple of times, however, I have found that I am not fond of the sound of my own voice.
Thanks to the College of Biological Sciences for creating these videos and putting them out there so that others can get a better sense of the full range of possibilities that are included in biology.
abirdingnaturalist 