First I want to say thank you to all of you for either being interns, thinking of being interns, or providing the opportunities that allow for us to be or think about being interns. I appreciate you all and have a lot of respect for the paths that we have all decided to take.

I can’t stop thinking about telling my future kids about what I did out of college. The places I got to visit, animals I got to see, and people I got to meet and work with all because of this internship. As much as I try to enjoy each moment as it comes and goes, there’s something so exciting about the notion of being able to share these experiences down the road. Every time we drive to Midvale or the McConnell allotment or even just driving around Boise I’ll be hit with sudden waves of disbelief. How did I get here?? I grew up in a small beach town north of Boston and thought Idaho was one big field of potatoes. If you had asked me what I’d be doing post-graduation at just about any moment before I had heard about the CBG CLM internship I would have said anything but living in Boise doing sage-grouse habitat assessments in the Four Rivers field office. I didn’t even know what the BLM was until I came to Colorado for college, let alone what a sage-grouse was. And that’s just it, the most valuable thing I will take away from this experience is the vast expanse of new knowledge I acquire daily.

Having been turned on to plant biology fairly late in the game (Jr. year of college), I feel like I’ve only just started building a foundation on which to build my greater plant biology library. Being at the training in Chicago and in our district office with my two extremely knowledgable coworkers (Joe Weldon, Cara Thompson) I struggle with and also appreciate how much I have to learn. As hard as it can be, there’s something so engaging about doing or learning something for the first time. You’re aware of every little thing that’s happening around you and completely immersed in the moment. It’s exhausting and frustrating if you aren’t a “natural” right away, but the reward of looking back once you’ve mastered the new skill and of remembering when you were floundering trying to ID a grass or conduct a transect and seeing how far you’ve come is a great feeling.

I’m proud of myself for having ventured into a completely alien place and job and being one month away and loving it so much.

My goals for this next month are to keep asking questions, not be self-conscious about admitting what I don’t know, and to keep ‘splorin’!!

p.s. Never done this blog thing before so my apologies if I’m missing the mark but hope you all are well!

Signing off from the land of trees.

–

Zander Goepfert