year 3
Junior year exposed me to more forestry classes, leading me to finally add my passion as a major. I also completed an internship, countless field trips, and dived deeper into developing my GIS skills.
FOR 339 - Dendrology
One of the hardest forestry classes is Dendrology, where students are required to memorize over 160 species identification, common and scientific names, and life history facts. While I was in this class, suicides were rampant on campus and tough classes with strict professors were considered part of the problem. Dr. Jefferies deviated from the norm by doing her best to make her class a stress sink rather than a stress source. During this time, Dr. Jefferies created the "Tree Love" assignment, where we had to be creative in mixing tree knowledge and humor or art. The meme to the right is what I created.
The meme I created. This is about an invasive shrub called glossy privet.
The transparent ring around the leaves is visible.
The meme I created. This is about an invasive shrub called glossy privet.
u.s. fish and wildlife service
I landed an internship working at the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge in McBee, South Carolina, working under the Refuge Forester. During this internship, I got my first real-world application of forestry with habitat management, laborious fieldwork, and growing comfortable in an environment where I didn't know everything.
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During that summer, I got experience marking and cruising timber, banding mourning doves, working with the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, and refuge upkeep for visitor experience enhancement. Read my reflection blog on the left. Looking back on the essay, I can tell how far my understanding of what I was doing has come.
RMS field trip
One of the field trips in my Silviculture class was to eastern North Carolina to visit Resource Management Services, a timber investment management organization interested in managing loblolly pine plantations for maximum return for their clients. Our field trip focused on the land management side of the organization, which made me fall in love with the production side of forestry, something I had never previously considered.
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A year and a half later, I will be working for RMS full-time post-graduation in their Wilmington office, coming full circle from the little junior-year me on a field trip with my future coworkers. Flip through my field notes from the trip on the right.​
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gis 510 - fundamentals of gis
After taking an entry-level GIS class at the recommendation of my podcast guest Kinsie, I realized how much I loved the software and decided to further my education with it. Therefore, I took a graduate-level class, which pushed the bounds of what was normally required of me in class. I loved the challenge and I loved learning more about GIS, and these skills have become continuously beneficial in my other classes.
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My artifact is my final project, where I looked to answer a forestry question from scratch. Included are my map layout, procedure log & final report, and model.
