October 2010
Hello Current and Future Interns!
I am going to tell you about the exciting opportunity I recently had to attend the 37th Annual Natural Areas Conference in Osage Beach, MO, part of Lake of the Ozarks. The 5-day experience was a great chance for me to interact with conservation-minded professionals, hear about current research, and hone my public speaking abilities by giving a formal presentation.
The majority of participants in the conference were career professionals and I was one of few students/recent grads/jobseekers in attendance. However, the theme of this year’s conference was “Connecting Across Generations and Disciplines” and the conference organizers expressed interest in attracting more younger participants in the future. They also expressed their frustration with lack of able communicators in the industry, and the difficulty of finding recent graduates who have applied experience, like the hands-on experience we have been fortunate enough to get from the CLM Program.
I attended talks on a wide variety of topics including the history of conservation and the Natural Areas Movement, identification of grass species, invasive species, pollinators in the natural system, and fire ecology. Each room had a separate lecture series workshop and each conference attendee could also attend a field trip related to one of the workshops. I chose to go to the hands-on application of prescribed fire. Had the weather been favorable we would have done a controlled burn on a 100 acre plot, but due to lack of rain we were unable to do so. It was still very interesting to see all the equipment, walk the area perimeter, discuss the various steps necessary to carry out a burn, and learn about typical fire behavior. We also visited burn sites in Ozark Caverns and Ha Ha Tonka Parks and compared the vegetation found there with that found in unburned areas.
Attending the conference cemented my desire to work in the field of natural resource management. Meeting so many individuals who were so passionate about their careers and able to make a real difference was very inspiring. One of the sessions I attended was a ‘World Café’ where we broke up into small groups and discussed how we could improve certain aspects of career preparation or effectiveness such as internships, higher education, and job skills. We rotated three times. In the first two rotations we listed any ideas that came into our heads and in the third session we prioritized the most important ones. A representative from each team then presented these ideas to the whole room. In the interest of allowing younger generations to acquire necessary communication skills, I was chosen to present the priorities of the higher education group to a room of over 60 people. This audience proved much larger than that present in the smaller session where I presented the CLM Intern Experience with Krissa (Conservation Scientist and Manager of the CLM program at the Chicago Botanic Garden) and my peers. While speaking in front of so many accomplished people off-the-cuff was a nerve-wracking experience, it made me a lot more confident in my abilities. It also served as an introduction that led to many more people coming up and talking with me than might have happened otherwise. If you have the chance to apply to attend the conference in the future, I would highly recommend it. It is a great learning experience and a lot of fun!
You can learn more about the Natural Areas Association here: http://naturalarea.org/
Cheers,
Diana DelleChiaie
Conservation and Land Management Intern