reflection
The Power of Community; And Being Outside
Honors Portfolio, Spring 2024
INTRODUCTION
My journey through college reminds me of an amphitheater. Each step forward brings you closer to the stage that everyone yearns to see, and each step brings you to a row with less capacity than the row you came from. That’s the nature of a funnel; the circumference is always shrinking as one moves down. For me, the stage is graduating college and entering a field I’m passionate about with the tools in my belt to succeed in that career. I entered the show as a freshman, on the broadest step and with the fuzziest view of the stage. Each experience at North Carolina State University made my goals more tailored, my interests more polished, and my view of the stage clearer.
I went to North Carolina State University at 18 years old, bright-eyed and away from home for the first time. My high school career ended with a pandemic and a deep desire for independence and sociality, and I was hoping that NC State would connect me with these goals. I enrolled as an Engineering First Year with my goals set on Environmental Engineering. Weeks into my first semester, I was denied the independence and sociality I wanted and found myself back at my parents' house in front of a glowing Zoom screen displaying Calculus II. I also battled the idea that despite my short dance with engineering, I knew the path was not for me. So, only one-eighth of the way in my college career, I completed a CODA application for Environmental Science. Immediately, my academic life improved.
However, a semester on a COVID campus led to the most mentally tough time of my life. I slowly got through it as I put myself out there with classmates and work, which led to these connections developing into friendships. I was on track to graduate in three years until I joined the Society of American Foresters and started spending time with forestry students, who convinced me that adding a forestry degree would be worth it. So I did, extending my college career back to the full four years, and my peers were incredibly correct. Over the next year and a half, social, academic, and professional experiences developed my passion for forestry. Every class was more interesting than the last and I was always itching to talk about what I was learning. I slowly became involved in the college with clubs and faculty and developed my external experiences to be supplemental to my learning. Every day, I fall in love with forestry and being in the woods and I am always excited to learn more. My portfolio consists of the most important and transformative events that led me to the passion I feel today, including the communities I found that gave me the confidence and encouragement to pursue my true interests.
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YEAR ONE
As I briefly touched on earlier, the second semester of my freshman year was a social disaster. COVID had sent a majority of the student population home, leaving me alone in my dorm room with my only socialization with professors on Zoom. I longed for communities like the ones I had with my high school friend group and my first-ever job at a local seafood restaurant. These feelings slowly ate away at me until I had become a robot as a method for survival: wake up, eat in my dorm room, class, eat in my dorm room, class, eat in my dorm room, sleep. Repeat. It was a soul-crushing routine that I only broke to pity my own experiences. And as a pure coincidence during one of my unproductive social media scrolls, the Wellness and Recreation Center posted an Instagram story announcing they were hiring. I needed money and I needed socialization, so I filled out the application. Within weeks, I was welcoming patrons in at the front desk, with a smile behind my mask. I shyly started engaging in conversation with my coworkers in the breakroom and an occasional classmate at the desk. Thankfully, everyone was either in the same position as me, or they were older and had more experience being a college student. These older students so graciously showed me kindness and accepted me into their community. Slowly, the workforce turned over as the seniors I admired graduated. I also moved up in age and comfort level at work, slowly talking to people regularly and sitting with one coworker in class. And just like that, I had conquered another step in my amphitheater. I finally had a friend group and a coworker who quickly became one of my best friends. I had a community that I had dreamed of since graduating high school, which only grew deeper with time. Today, I am still an employee of Wellness and Recreation, with some of my best friends and biggest supporters coming from this unique student employment opportunity.
Aside from the social change the gym provided me, I also had countless professional growth opportunities within my three and a half years of employment. I gained confidence in my decision-making and communication with superiors. I learned about what goes into providing a premier and safe customer experience. I was also promoted from working the front desk to being a Facility Supervisor, being entrusted with managing 430,000 square feet and any situations, events, injuries, conflicts, questions, and anything else you can think of. I learned how to work with little instruction and lead a team of employees. I had the pleasure of sitting in on many interviews for entry-level, supervisor, and professional staff candidates. My soft-skill toolbox has been padded, and I am leaving the Wellness and Recreation team for a step lower in the amphitheater.
My only in-person class my freshman year was HON 398 Women in the Workforce, a special topics class taught by Marcy Bullock. Admittedly, I signed up for the class thinking it was a history class about literal female participation in the workforce. The classes ended with an assignment to interview someone with our dream career. As briefly mentioned, I was brand new to Environmental Science and couldn’t even begin to come up with something I was interested in. I posted on environmental and conservation Reddit pages and received a response from Kinsie Rayburn, an agricultural engineer working directly with farmers for non-profits. Kinsie also worked as a GIS specialist for the USDA, encouraging me to take GIS classes while I was in school due to increasing applications in natural resource fields. I was not exaggerating when I said, “All I know about GIS is that it’s like, super important,” in the interview. Sure enough, her advice stuck with me and I went on to take multiple GIS courses, even up to the graduate level. I included one of my GIS final projects later in the portfolio to show the growth in my knowledge of the subject and how my interest in the topic has developed.
YEAR TWO
I took on a Forest Management minor to complement my Environmental Science major, which brought me to FOR 252 Introduction to Forest Science with Dr. Joseph Roise. This class was a comprehensive introduction to basic topics in forestry, with a strong field component. This class gave me a foundation of skills that prepared me for the career in forestry I didn't know was coming and also made me fall in love with the field, eventually leading me to change my major. Dr. Roise also became a faculty member I bonded with, eventually chaperoning a wilderness expedition in Yosemite National Park, which I discussed in my senior year. I also watched my first prescribed fire in this class, something unlike anything I had ever seen. I loved how ecological management could also be fun and look cool. Eventually, I obtained my Firefighter Type II certification, which allows me to work on prescribed fires for the university and the state. Technically, I am also qualified to serve on a wildfire crew, but I don’t think that's in my future anytime soon. I completed my first prescribed burn exactly two years after I watched the one in FOR 252, to the day.
Another community I found in college was Epsilon Eta Iota, an environmental honors fraternity for students of all majors. I joined at the very end of my freshman year and was once again adopted by an existing community that graciously extended their friendship to me. I developed deep connections with these people, who all shared common interests with me, and I was thrilled to participate in club events.
Eventually, I wanted to give back to the fraternity, so I joined the leadership board as the Vice President of Finance. The position had its unique set of challenges, but I was excited to contribute and improve the club for members. In the blink of an eye, my term ended and I reverted back to being a member. As my academic interests became tailored and I joined other student organizations in the College of Natural Resources, I had too much on my plate, and something needed to give. Epsilon Eta had served me well in the first few years of college, but the nature of the club had changed And despite my gratitude and history with the club, I learned that sometimes, good things have expiration dates. I realized that it was time for me to move on to bigger and better things that positively contributed to my educational experience. This decision was very tough, but the action proved to be much easier than I anticipated. My comfort served as evidence that I made the right decision. To this day, I remain in close contact with those people I met in my first few years, and it is incredible to see how they also blossomed as we grew older. I have since put my energy into other clubs that have directly contributed to my experience as a forester (and that are in this portfolio).
YEAR THREE
I continued to take forestry classes to fulfill my minor fall semester of junior year. My love for these classes later convinced me to add Forest Management as a major. One class in particular, FOR 339 Dendrology with Dr. Steph Jefferies, became unknowingly important for reasons outside of academics. I unfortunately witnessed an early morning suicide in October of that year which caused my world to explode. My life had paused, but life around me had not. Before this, I never cared to develop close relationships with my professors. Class sizes were too big and I was never super passionate about the coursework to reach out. And I definitely hadn’t had any personal reasons to reach out about, until this. The thought of being vulnerable with my professors was terrifying. Yet, I had no choice, and it turned out to not be that bad. Dr. Jefferies was monumentally important in this experience. She gave the entire class a no-stress assignment to make us laugh, to make us happy, or to make us think outside the box. She gave us complete creative liberty to create anything artistic that we wanted, as long as it was dendrology-themed, which is where my tree-themed meme was born. Her action was small, but the impact was big. The assignment was a breath of relief during a critical time from a stressful class. One of many lessons I learned from this experience was that vulnerability can be rewarded with kindness. In a time when the harshness of professors is criticized but not improved upon, it was comforting to see that some progress is being made. I will always remember Dr. Jefferies’ kindness and will have one artifact of happiness from this time. Her response also gave me the confidence to connect with professors throughout the rest of my education. This semester is also when I finally added Forest Management as a major.
As a requirement for my Environmental Science degree, I needed to complete an internship and I only had one summer to do it. I quickly began applying to any remotely-environmental internship solely so I could complete the requirement. I accepted the first position that gave me an offer, which was an environmental outreach position at Mono Lake, California. I was thrilled with the location and not the job description, but I had the comfort of knowing I would be graduating. A few weeks before I was supposed to leave for California, I received a call from one of the countless positions I applied for. It was for a position in McBee, South Carolina; a forestry internship with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now my interests for this one flipped; location, bad, job, good. Knowing this opportunity would be better for my career, I ended up in a town with a population of 750 people and one Dollar General. Immediately, I was thrown into the deep end of forestry, suddenly required to know a lot about something I barely had a minor in. I am also not very comfortable in scenarios where I don’t know everything, so this was a personal learning curve compounded on the educational learning curve. With the help of my boss and coworkers, I filled some of the gaps in my forestry knowledge and grew comfortable with my discomfort. I learned that asking questions does not make you dumb and good mentors will never make you feel dumb for doing so. I also got a plethora of hands-on field experience which helped me decide to add forestry the following semester. I spent almost every day in the woods, which is one of the most essential ways to develop as a forester. Exposure to the woods helps you to read them, which is critical for managing ecologically and accurately. My experience was physically tough, emotionally draining, incredibly beautiful, and immensely impactful. This internship helped me make the next step in my amphitheater.
A given for all forestry classes is there will be a lab component with practical, hands-on field trips that take your education to another level. The benefits of these trips come at the price of traveling all across the state and late arrivals back to campus. During FOR 304 Pine Silviculture, we took a trip to Wilmington, North Carolina to visit a timber investment management organization called Resource Management Services to learn how they manage their pine plantations for maximum return for their investors. I feverishly took notes at every stop and diligently asked any questions I had. As I mentioned in my podcast from freshman year, I was only interested in conservation and forest ecology and had no interest in plantation management. That was until this class when I learned how managers mix creativity and science by modifying inputs into a forest for different goals and site conditions, all while operating within sustainability. This field trip in particular allowed me to visualize the concepts we had been learning in the classroom and preview some job possibilities in a field I had given no thought to just a month before. I am grateful I fell in love with silviculture and that I can bring my ecology interests into the practice. Full circle, I am thrilled to say I will be working for Resource Management Services in Wilmington full-time after I graduate. Without this class and trip, I would have been blind to what other topics might interest me.
This year, I also took my first and only graduate-level class, GIS 510 Foundations of GIS. Being an undergraduate student in a graduate course was challenging. I was used to intense workloads, but this was completely different from what I was used to. I would spend 15-20 hours a week. And for someone who so badly didn’t want to work a desk job, I find it ironic how much I enjoyed sitting in the Data Experience Lab for all those hours, trying to figure out where I went wrong or how I could solve something. I eventually built up skills that decreased the total time I spent working. Every weekly assignment required a detailed procedure log documenting every step of analysis you complete, which was different from the undergraduate level course. However, I found this step to be crucial to understanding the analyses and storing them long-term. The procedure logs have also been great references as I encounter GIS problems in other classes, so I am thankful I have them.
YEAR FOUR
Forestry Summer Camp is a required tradition that has persevered since 1936. Students take five classes over ten weeks at G.W. Hill Forest in Durham County, residing in cabins, eating from a mess hall, and receiving transformative hands-on experience. I can’t begin to put into words the unique scenario of living, learning, and traveling with my classmates for ten weeks straight. Still, this experience was quintessential to my career within the College of Natural Resources. I developed lifelong friendships with my peers, and know I can always reach out to them with questions as we enter the workforce. They became another social community for me and they completely transformed my classroom experiences after we went back to school. Due to my major change, I got this experience a year later than normal, but I am incredibly grateful for the timeline where I met this group. I also got to develop closer bonds with CNR faculty, as I had the chance to work closely with them on assignments. Some of my favorite experiences included traveling to the coast and the mountains for Forest Communities, becoming Firefighter Type II certified so I could work on prescribed burns and banding songbirds.
Looking back on my work, I see how much I still have to learn as I enter the workforce. Even after just a semester and a half, I can see places I can improve on. I hope that with the last few weeks of my classes and as I enter the workforce, I can work on these gaps in my skill level and commit to continuous improvement and reflection. Reflection has proved to be a critical step within the amphitheater; looking backward helps you move forward. For my artifact, I included a few of my assignments. I enjoyed reading through my past work, applying my recent education to decipher what I would do differently, and celebrating what I did right.
Another requirement of the Forest Management degree is completing the senior capstone by creating a theoretical management plan for specific landowner objectives. This process by far is the most common demand of a forester in the southeast and everyone generally follows the same checklist when writing a plan: define landowner objectives, inventory the trees, determine feasibility, and develop a timeline. Each student was only responsible for inventorying an equal percentage of the property, and we would use each other's data to manage the entire land basin. And since our senior capstone group was not an established forest company with stellar software for inventory data collection, we were to collect all our data on paper in the field, then input it into Excel ourselves. Our professor heard the same alarm bells you might hear when you read this methodology, so we had an entire lecture on how to catch and correct input errors in large datasets. Now, I am a forestry student with not much technological education outside of the software niches of forestry. However, I had an idea to create a data collection system georeferenced to a map of the property so each student could collect information on their phones. This would standardize data entry by limiting responses to only what is possible within the scope of the question, while also ensuring people only inventoried a location once. So, I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and make my idea come to life. I dove into research and ESRI forums, into never-ending trial and error. Anytime I thought I had polished the software, a new little error lurked. I thoroughly enjoyed learning what goes into software development and applications within mapping products, happy to have those skills in my toolbelt. Not only was I intellectually pushed, but I was tested socially. The success of my peers and friends depended on my success, something that caused me a lot of discomfort - as my classmates never failed to notify me of an error. It was awkward to have my failures displayed for everyone to see and test, and harder for me to take accountability for them and serve the class with a functional system. The entire whirlwind of an experience concluded with everyone collecting their data and us moving on to the next step of our projects, with my hard work having served its purpose and being forgotten behind us.
I also became the president of our Society of American Foresters chapter during my senior year, which had its first active year since COVID-19 during my junior year. I’ve had many other club leadership positions, but I always went for lower-level positions to avoid being the one in charge. This year, however, I decided to give being in charge a whirl. A revitalized club provides unique challenges with its structure and engagement, which constantly pushed me to slowly improve the club. As time went on, meetings became more regular and members began to engage more, but I was burning out trying to do everything myself. Our most notable event was attending our parent organization’s national convention in Sacramento, California. On top of this, a professor requested a backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park before the conference. I had never been east of Tennessee and had never been responsible for planning a trip of this magnitude, and most definitely not for fifteen other people! I also wanted to obtain as much money as possible to help offset students’ travel expenses, which served as another facet of planning I was responsible for. After many setbacks, as I had victories, fifteen students were set to travel across the country in October.
When we arrived in California, the issues did not end there. A quarter of our group got stranded in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, conflict between students on the trail was frequent, and lost bags at hotels (yes, plural) were just a taste of the issues our group experienced. It felt as if every minute proposed a new battle for me to fight, a new problem for me to solve. I got very comfortable reacting confidently and quickly to issues, persevering through the stress they caused me. Creativity and the acceptance of changed plans were also skills I was quickly forced to acquire. Everyone was once again directly dependent on me, with their enjoyment and safety my responsibility. Somehow, eleven students and one seventy-five-year-old professor backpacked twenty-eight miles on the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Loop, and sixteen students attended a successful conference in Sacramento. I was so incredibly grateful for the chance to travel somewhere new with my beloved friends and peers and feel great pride in the fact I was able to plan a fun and safe trip for everybody.
CONCLUSION
Now I am standing front row of the show and just got invited on stage. In the next few months, I’ll be living in a new town with new friends and new coworkers and new communities and I'll have new responsibilities. This portfolio let me reflect on how many steps lay between current-me and freshman-me. Every experience in this portfolio and not in it have truly shaped me into the person I am today with the passion I have. The show’s almost over and I’ll be once again standing at the top of an amphitheater, with a show so fuzzy I have no clue what I’m heading towards. But, the past four years have been unforgettable and rewarding, so I’m excited for what’s in store down each and every stair.