As my internship begins to wind down here at the Eugene BLM office I find myself basking in the anticipation of my first term as a masters student at Oregon State University.

Two summers ago I took an intensive 2-week course in ecological restoration and knew from that moment onward that I wanted to one day become a restoration practitioner. I still had over a year of course work ahead of me to finish my B.S. and had not given serious thought to graduate school. When the professor of my summer restoration course recruited me to be in his new lab at Oregon State University it felt like one of those moments when you just have to say yes without a second thought. I did say yes, and I’m truly glad I did, but I never would have expected how things would actually play out.

It’s two years later and I just now feel like I’m starting to understand how all the pieces fit together. I had so many misconceptions going into this whole process that it’s kind of amazing it worked out at all. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was how to tell the difference between things I had control over and those I didn’t… to put my future in the hands of my advisor and a host of strangers… and to just hope everything would work out. I also had to learn to be my own advocate.

After several years of constantly feeling like everything was either just about to work out or blow up in my face I often look back and think of many things I wish I had known or done differently. Other times I look back and am glad that the road was rough because it forced me to navigate a very confusing and nebulous bureaucratic system, gave me an appreciation for how difficult it is to find funding for research, and to accept that there are many many things that are just simply out of my hands. Maybe the emotional roller-coaster I’ve been on the last two years was a product of my stubbornness to learn these lessons.

For anyone thinking about graduate school, (and more specifically a research-oriented M.S.) I cannot stress enough how important it is to lean heavily on at least one faculty member who has lots of experience advising graduate students and who has consistently found grant money for said students. At face value it seems like you can do most of the heavy lifting to get a research project up and running by yourself so long as you get accepted into a graduate program, but in reality for things to go smoothly one (or several faculty members) have to essentially pave the way for you (and they have to pave it well).

I’m just about to start school in 2 weeks and have a grant with enough funding to get me most of the way through my degree. Since I first embarked on this journey I’m just now about to start working towards my degree for real, all after hopping between half a dozen research ideas, three different departments at OSU, authoring several grant applications, and arriving at many many dead ends along the way. Despite the rough road I still feel very fortunate to be where I am now. I also can’t shake the feeling that I’ve already made it though the hardest part. At least now I can mostly see the path forward and have gained the confidence to know that with the help of my committee and and others I will be able to see this through.