Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jeremy - Biologist, Ecologist, Environmental Consultant.
90 Plays1 year ago
Jeremy wears many hats and all of them help with his career. He walks us thru his early jobs tracking and tagging quail, working in canneries in Alaska, all the way to his environmental consulting work with large corporations. If you love nature, want to ensure our environment is cared for responsibly, this could be the career for you!
If you enjoyed this interview and would like to support the show, you can do so HERE. Thanks!
Music by: SnoozyBeats - Song Title - "Keep It Calm". Please check out SnoozyBeats on PixaBay for a ton of awesome content! - LINK
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Guest Welcome
00:00:11
Speaker
Hey folks, you're listening to the jobs podcast. I am your host, Tim Hendricks. Your time is valuable. I'm not going to waste it. Let's get right to the interview. Hey Jeremy, welcome to the jobs podcast. Thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? I'm well, hi Tim. Thanks for having me. You bet.
Jeremy's Career Beginnings
00:00:30
Speaker
So let's start off by giving us your job title. It's an ecological, or I'm sorry. What is it again?
00:00:39
Speaker
I guess you could say a couple things. i'm I'm an ecologist or a biologist and I work as an environmental consultant. Okay. Is the consulting part the big umbrella that you use all of your biology training and whatnot to do? Is that how that works?
00:00:57
Speaker
it It is that that's the industry I work in and is the consulting industry. But by way of you know education and experience, i'm I'm a scientist, I'm a biologist or some people like to say ecologist, depending on what field of study you're focused on. Cool. Do you spend a lot of time behind a desk? Or are you traveling a lottery out in the middle of nowhere counting leaves? Or what what is it that you spend the majority of your day doing?
00:01:23
Speaker
It's a bit of everything these days as I get a bit longer in the tooth and spend I spend more time at the desk you know talking to clients and writing reports and helping the other younger biologists kind of come up in their career. But I still get out in the field a good bit and do some field studies. I travel and meet with regulatory agencies, state agencies, federal agencies.
00:01:47
Speaker
Sometimes it's counting leaves. Sometimes it's counting trees. Sometimes it's trapping wildlife. It's a pretty big umbrella that we do. And um yeah, it's all pretty interesting. Cool. I want
Inspiration and Early Career
00:01:58
Speaker
to dive into that. You said that you help younger folks coming up and that's kind of a big bulk of what our podcast is all about. So let's start off by just telling us a quick snapshot about your, where were you born, your childhood, kind of what got you into the career that you're in today.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, I was born in in Missouri. but Actually, it took wow, I take that back. I was born in Illinois. I lived in Peoria, Illinois for about two weeks of my life, I think. And then I really grew up in in Missouri, in Marchfield, Missouri. I lived there my entire life until I went off to college. i Went to college at Central Missouri State University in Northern Missouri. And then after that, I wound up moving to Texas, and I've been in Austin, Texas ever since.
00:02:47
Speaker
and Okay. What, what was your first step after college? Did you focus on, you said you had a degree in biology. Was there some early indications that you might want to get into the line of work that you're in or did you just want to keep going down something you found interesting or where did you, what was your, your path that kind of started you down this road that where you ended up where you're at now?
00:03:13
Speaker
I mean, I was an outdoorsy kid. I i think back in the 80s, we all were, to some degree. You know, you just played outside all the time. We we had a good friend group and some kind of little woodlands around us where we grew up. So we spent a lot of times running around the woods, building forts, and being outdoors. I think that gets you interested in things like camping and, you know, maybe I didn't know it at the time, but wildlife and and vegetation that I thought was a little pretty interesting. But at that point in your life, you're just running around and having fun. But I do remember there was a film back in the, I want to say it was the 90s maybe, it was a Sean Connery film called Medicine Man. And he plays a scientist that's researching, I think, the cure for cancer or AIDS, I can't remember which it was, but he travels to the Amazon rainforest and studying plants to try to find cures for this disease.
00:04:10
Speaker
And it's a really interesting film. It's all got a lot of action and it turns out it's all about this rare permeability of plant that has the the key to the cure. And ever since I saw that, I just thought, man, that just sounds like the most interesting job where you get to travel around the world studying different things. Hopefully there's some purpose behind what you're studying.
00:04:29
Speaker
And you just you get to see a lot of different aspects so of nature cuz everywhere you go It's gonna be different and that was it from that point on I knew exactly what I wanted to to do professionally I didn't know this job existed to be honest, but I knew this is the job I wanted and I knew I had to get a degree in biology or a couple of degrees in biology to get there and I just kind of set out on that path and made it happen and When you got your degree, did you, I assume that you went to look at like the DNR, Department of Conservation, something along those lines. Is that where you were thinking you would go?
Dream Jobs & Challenges
00:05:06
Speaker
but It was, yeah. Yeah. i So I went to to college in Missouri and right before I graduated, the summer before I graduated,
00:05:16
Speaker
I actually had a temporary research job with the Missouri Department of Conservation. I was working back in Southeast Missouri, working as an assistant research botanist. and I can tell you right now, it was a dream job. you know your I had one semester left in college. I spent a whole summer living in the Mark Twain National Forest with about 30 or 40 other biologists. and We're all studying different things, and it was an amazing summer.
00:05:43
Speaker
and That was kind of the the path that I thought was in front of me, you know working for an agency, DNR, Fish and Wildlife, Department of Conservation. well Any state has a variety of those agencies. And I thought I would just kind of figure out whatever path you know got me into that kind of role in the in the right geography. And that's that's where I started.
00:06:07
Speaker
So you finished, you had that summer, then you finished your college education. Then you moved to Texas. Is that right? Uh, sort of. I went back to college for a semester to finish up. And when I graduated, I had this old Volkswagen camper van and I had some acquaintances in Alaska.
00:06:32
Speaker
And so I kind of had connections to a job with Alaska Department of Fish and Game. I was going to go up and do some fisheries work, mostly kind of tagging salmon as they made their spring runs. And then you do use radio telemetry to follow them and kind of see what the migrational patterns are. And you kind of get a lot of population estimate data doing that. And that was the goal. So my then girlfriend and I drove to Alaska from Missouri and lived in that van for about three or four months.
00:07:01
Speaker
And it turns out the job fell through a couple of other jobs that kind of came up in the in the meantime, but they would have kept me in Alaska later into the fall than I wanted to be. And I really didn't want to drive a Volkswagen van home from Alaska in late November or December. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good idea. Yeah. So actually we took some kind of temporary jobs in the canneries, you know, fish cannery, made some money, hiked her around and really had a good time. And then we drove back and she was from Austin.
00:07:31
Speaker
And we made our trip back to Missouri and went back down to Austin and we're going to visit her family. And the goal was to actually turn back around, drive back to Missoula, Montana, and kind of set up shop there because I wanted to go to graduate school at the University of Montana. And when we got to Texas, my the motor on my van just really started to to give out after such a long trip.
00:07:52
Speaker
And we limped into Austin and went to her family's house and parked a parked of the van in her dance bar and and it stayed there for the next seven years and I've been here ever since.
00:08:05
Speaker
The time in Alaska, I have been to a number of states, but I have not been to Alaska. And that's one of my, I guess, a bucket list for lack of a better word. Is it as awesome as I think it is as far as just the majestic mountains and whatnot? Yeah, but for sure. It's gorgeous. It's wild. It's it's that's huge. It's rugged.
00:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, i would it was it's really impressive. I will say it's a little, you know, I'm a big fan of Montana, if you've ever spent any mont pen time in western Montana. Yes. My my one statement, i say I tell this to a lot of people who were thinking about going to Alaska, and and I think everyone has a different opinion of Alaska. Alaska is wild and rugged and gorgeous.
00:08:57
Speaker
But you get a lot more gray skies in Alaska than you get in Montana. Montana's just on those gorgeous blue skies that go on forever. So I'm kind of a Montana person, but. Right. the Well, if you spent much time in the canneries, you probably didn't get to enjoy the nice part of Alaska. I'd imagine cannery work was pretty rough. It was interesting. yeah It wasn't that bad. like Yeah. i got I got lucky and worked in one of the row houses where I was processing salmon row fish eggs for the Japanese caviar industry. and was It was not difficult work. It was just long hours, you know, 18 hour days just working with fish raw. Good grief. Yeah. But you made a lot of money in a poor amount of time. Yeah. So your van broke down. You're stuck in Austin. Now what?
Wildlife Research Experience
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:49
Speaker
The thought was they know find find another job somewhere across the country and in in and environmental sciences and biological sciences. and In those days, there there was a website that was maintained by Texas A and&M University. and It's still there. It's still a very useful website. It's called the Texas A and&M Wildlife and Fisheries Job Board.
00:10:13
Speaker
And I have hired people from that jobs board in recent years, and I always direct up-and-coming biologists that are thinking about, you know, as they prepare to graduate. I always direct them to that jobs board. It's a good kind of first stop to to start looking for some job opportunities. Back then, that was the only thing like it. and Everybody who was an up-and-coming biologist went to the jobs board and really tried to find jobs there. And they posted national positions, and a lot of them were short-term positions back in the day.
00:10:43
Speaker
And that's kind of how you had to get your start in the industry I'm in, is you'd do a lot of short-term seasonal temporary positions until you could build a resume and then get into a permanent position and say consulting or a private agency. So I looked for jobs all over the US in my time you know sitting around in in Austin. And um I found a job with the University of Georgia.
00:11:12
Speaker
It was a wildlife research technician role, short-term, about six months. And I thought, right, here's another chance to build the resume. So my girlfriend stayed in Austin and I bought an old Subaru for $1,200 and I drove to Georgia. And I lived there for six months trapping quail. I was working on a long-term quail study.
00:11:35
Speaker
And we were, you know, collaring quails would fit a little collar around their neck. And then we'd go out and track them with the radio telemetry equipment and then bring that into yeah GIS. And then you can map out and model their populations and kind of see what sort of habitat they're using, what kind of population distribution they have. And that helps with quail management for the fun.
00:11:55
Speaker
the The radio telemetry thing, has that been replaced by satellite or GPS? I mean, has is that old technology now or is that still regularly used when you're doing tracking of that type? It's old technology, but it's still pretty effective in certain applications. Fish and Game still ah radio collars, big herbivores, moose and elk, bears, things like that. And then they fly in helicopters and they can, you know, or fix new aircraft. And that's a kind of a more efficient way of tracking. ah GPS collars are certainly on the forefront these days. You know, a lot of the wolves that you've probably read about in the news and Yellowstone, those are all GPS collared and they can track those remotely. Those are great. Sometimes the old old technology is kind of interesting, it's still good to use.
00:12:43
Speaker
yeah And then those pit tags, passive integrated transponder tags that we use sometimes. as Kind of old technology, but still very much applicable to insert. Is that a ready radio frequency type or is that some other? Yeah, yeah yeah that's right. They're like an RFID tag. so Oh, okay. Yeah, you can insert them under the skin of you know fish or You know, any any organism really, we use them a lot in freshwater mussels these days. And then you go back with a scanner and you can kind of wand for them if you know generally where they are and you can find them. That's usually for close in application. And you know, if you know where they are, you could trap them and then you can get them in hand and scan them. And then that gives you a lot of specific data about that individual in particular. Like when you for trap it, when you tagged it, the weight, the side, and you can kind of monitor growth and stuff like that.
00:13:34
Speaker
um So yeah, but lots of different technology for a different applications. Just out of curiosity, those things that you said you put underneath the skin of say a fish or a mussel, what have you, how large is something like that? Is it about the size of a grain of rice or is it smaller? Yeah, it's probably a good, a good, a good estimate. Uh, some of them, they do have size ranges and get larger pit tags. if You need to have a little stronger frequency response.
00:14:02
Speaker
Uh, but I'd say size of a grain rice, 12 millimeters, nine to 12 millimeters are usually the sizes that we purchase and use on projects. So I think that maybe about the size or maybe just a touch bigger. Hmm. Not to go down a rabbit hole, but when you talked about tracking bears and moose and whatnot, I've watched a number of those, you know, nature shows and crocodile hunter and all that kind of stuff growing up.
00:14:26
Speaker
And I've often wondered, you'll see a bear or an elk or moose that has a big collar around its neck and it's got that big thing on it. And I'm often wondering, do other animals come up to them and be like, dude, Larry, what is that thing around your neck? you know do they Do they treat the animals differently that have that thing on them or do they not even really pay attention to it? and That's a good question. i've I've actually wondered that myself. I've i've also wondered if it benefits other animals in a way. yeah if you're If you're a bear and you're kind of in a scrum with another big bear and you're fighting over you know range or resources, I mean, if you could get a paw on that thing and pull down on it, you know imagine you've got a dog and you need to grab the collar to kind of get up get a hold of them. I wonder if another bear could do that to a bear that does have a collar on them and maybe get some advantage. but um Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there's been some published literature on that, whether there's any kind of bias towards animals that have
00:15:25
Speaker
ah call or not I think maybe at the end of the day, it's probably but probably not enough to be significant in the long term. I would think if it if it was obvious that it was shortening the lives of different animals that are being tracked, that kind of data would rise to the surface over time.
00:15:45
Speaker
yeah yeah Yeah, especially when we we use, you know, I say we the collective, we we use those things in applications for, you know, endangered species all the time. And and i that that's you would undermine the whole point of monitoring those endangered populations if you're putting them at increased risk by, you know, sure. but not to them right yeah but what's What's the largest animal that you've ever had to tag? Have you ever been involved with tagging a bear and seen once a dated up close?
00:16:15
Speaker
I have it. No, probably the closest I came to it was when I was in Alaska, one of the jobs that Fish and Game offered me. they knew i I knew how to weld, and they offered me a job to go north of Fairbanks and weld moose pins to trap moose. Then once we trapped them, we used to date them and collar them, actually. and that That was one of the jobs I just thought, I don't want to be in Fairbanks, Alaska in late November. No, you don't.
00:16:41
Speaker
Well, no. no i i you know In my line of work, especially these days, we usually work with smaller organisms. that's Not everybody does. But yeah probably the largest I've worked with, you know these muscles are pretty small. They're easy to handle. Lizards, turtles, other purposeological fauna. yeah Most of the time, you know pretty small, small scale wildlife, small mammals, things like that and in my line of work.
00:17:09
Speaker
yeah is
00:17:12
Speaker
Is most of the stuff that you track, is that for Department of Conservation type data? I know that you said that you consult and you you work for, I don't quite know.
00:17:26
Speaker
the arena that you're in as far as if you're not working for the DNR or a conservation group of some kind, what private industries would typically seek your resources or your expertise to come over and say, hey, we're looking at building X, Y, and Z here, whether it's a mine or an amusement park or whatever. And we need to see if that's, you know,
00:17:48
Speaker
yeah Yeah, that's a good question. And maybe I'll kind of circle back and and um pick up after my time at the University of Georgia, that might kind of help a little bit. Oh, yeah. Okay, sure. Yeah.
Consulting Career & Responsibilities
00:17:59
Speaker
So, ah you know, I finished that job, came back to Austin and at the time my girlfriend was working for this biological consulting firm and she goes was out in San Diego.
00:18:11
Speaker
California working yeah basically doing kind of low end stuff. So she was serving as a biological monitor. There was a company that was installing fiber optic cables in in you know roadside ditches basically through you know urbanized San Diego. And there were these endangered arroyo toads that lived in that area and the US s Fish and Wildlife issued in one of the permits that was issued to this project that said you basically have to monitor for these toads while you're installing this fiber optic cable to make sure that your installation activities don't endanger them. And so she was hired along with numerous other but young biologists to basically stand beside these you know directional, these little H2D directional drilling rigs to install these cables. And it's pretty boring work when you serve as a biological monitor, but it paid well
00:19:00
Speaker
And then she got on a couple of other projects and that was my first foray into consulting. I didn't even know the industry existed before that. I came from Georgia and I thought, wow, that's really that's really kind of what I want to do. That's more in line with this this idea, this dream job I had of traveling around as a scientist, working on different types of projects, not just being focused on one particular species or or one you aspect of environmental you know ecological you know consulting. I just wanted to do a little bit of everything and that that consulting job kind of summed it all up for me. I started looking for jobs and Austin was a great place because Austin is a little more progressive as a city and there are a lot of environmental consulting firms and jobs here in Austin. 2001 I think
00:19:47
Speaker
So there were still some companies back then, but you know the city's grown a lot and this industry has grown a lot. So there are more of these jobs available these days. But I found a job, i started working with a small local firm. They really just tried to get my foot in the door. I did a lot of work early on behind drilling rigs, geotechnical drilling rigs, because I had some geological you know experience from from college.
00:20:13
Speaker
I traveled around all over the the South, Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and just kind of worked on drilling projects, got the occasional biological project, and just gained more and more experience. And then after about seven years, I kind of thought, well, I really probably need to go back to to graduate school and get a master's degree if I want to advance. So I went to Texas State University, got a master's degree while I was still working for this consulting firm.
00:20:42
Speaker
And eventually I went on to another consulting firm that just had better access to more of the real scientific projects that I wanted to work on. And and then it's just kind of grown from there. So I've been doing this for about 24 years now, but yeah, environmental consulting, to answer the question is,
00:21:00
Speaker
what I hate to say this because I think it's going to sound kind of terrible, but we're almost like attorneys and that up wolf that gives me the willing state. But we we're we're hired by companies, and a lot of times we interface with attorneys. Say there's a company that wants to, like I said, develop a mine, or they want to drill a bunch of oil wells, or they want to build a pipeline. There needs to be some level of environmental due diligence in that process where that company, they want to limit their exposure to litigation and risk. They don't want to be sued by somebody because they be sure look at the environmental implications. no are people like us and Sometimes they'll hire attorneys and attorneys will hire us.
00:21:39
Speaker
And then we look at the full breadth of their project and we try to think through what type of environmental impacts they may have and it could be broad range, it could be very focused and we study it. Sometimes that means we physically go out and we trap wildlife and we study what wildlife is there. Sometimes it's very high level and we just do yeah desktop level reports and we look at the resources and write technical reports for them. and And then we give our best recommendations to these developers and clients, whoever they may be.
00:22:09
Speaker
and they pay us and we get paid kind of like an attorney does on a retainer or on a fixed you know number of hours that we build to the project. And it works very much like that kind of ah attorney world ah in the way we're contracted. But um yeah, that's that's kind of the bulk of our work. Sometimes we contract directly with the regulatory agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife or the Department of Conservation So there are other client avenues for us, but most of the time it's private commercial development. A lot of our clientele is the oil and gas industry or the energy industry. um And we work I work for a global firm, so we have clients all around the world and we have projects all over the world. Have you been able to travel to other places besides the United States?
00:23:05
Speaker
I had. yeah yeah The company I work for, we're headquartered in Amsterdam. and the now ah we're okay We're a Dutch firm. Our US headquarters is in Denver. okay so I interface with our international colleagues. um I have some good friends that have developed through that over the years. I worked on a few projects here and there. I'm in Texas. I'm in Austin, Texas. so We do some border infrastructure projects. so I do some work in Mexico, across the border.
00:23:34
Speaker
not Not really extensive work, it's just you know kind of border environment just just over the border. I've supported some projects in other parts of the world trying to stake what comes to mind. We've done some offshore work in the North Sea off of you have the the coast of ah off of the UK.
00:23:58
Speaker
us tok um I've done very remote type support of those projects, you know technical expertise with respect to fisheries and things like that. I haven't been on the ground on those projects. I have traveled over to some of our Dutch offices and met with clients there. And then this is a sidebar, but our company is you know, mostly European and every winter we have a soccer tournament in Germany, which is kind of a big networking event for all of our folks to get together and just kind of meet and grow and and you know exchange ideas. So I tend to go to our Germany ah soccer tournament every ah February and March and play in a tournament and then just get to meet a lot of folks that I wouldn't get to meet otherwise.
00:24:42
Speaker
That would be fun. I mean, I grew up playing soccer, so I know a lot of Americans don't really get into it in comparison to baseball or football, but, well, American football, but soccer is, man, the fans anywhere else on the globe are just about as rabid as you can possibly be. They take it so serious. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I'm a big fan of soccer and, you know, I didn't grow up, grow up with it, you know,
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, we but in Marshall, Missouri. that's Right. But the yeah, big family. I had a question. You mentioned something a bit ago when you were working with the different firms, and they when you sit down to these meetings, is it Is it usually pretty professional and everybody gets along or is there a low level tension there where you're kind of fighting each other professionally or is it kind of, we both have a job to do and you know, we each know where each other's line is and how's the interaction between those two entities when you sit down to look over a project? Yeah, it's a good question. Most of the time it's very professional.
00:25:56
Speaker
and very cordial. i've I've got some great relationships with but folks at these other firms that hire us. They're repeat clients, people that you work with for years and you get to know them very well. I'll have my counterpart that works for the client at all these different firms and talk all the time and give them a ring anytime. Sometimes I hang out with them socially outside of work too. so There's definitely some really good relationships there. The the company I work for,
00:26:27
Speaker
We're not just scientists. We also have probably the bulk of our employees globally are actually engineers of one form or another. So we do a lot of engineering and there's a lot of cross coordination of these different skill sets on projects. So you know client A may come to us and want to develop a rather large you know petrochemical plant on the coast somewhere.
00:26:50
Speaker
And that takes a lot of really diverse skill sets to do that. These are very, very big projects, very complicated to get off the ground. The funding alone is is immense. all You need a lot of different technical ah subject matter experts to kind of come to the table and want to really start from the beginning in that planning process.
00:27:09
Speaker
So I oftentimes sit at that table from an environmental planning perspective because it's so complex to to get permits for tough projects like that and to evaluate all the environmental um impacts that might be associated with it. And you're doing this, you know, years in advance of the actual construction of the project.
00:27:27
Speaker
Well, at the same time, at that same table, there are engineers talking about you know design concepts and feasibility studies and what can and can't be done. So you're very much working in this iterative process with those people trying to say, well, look, you can do that physically. But just be aware that if you build that component in that location, it's going to require this extra permitting step, which might take you another 18 months and $100 billion. dollars So what's more important, the schedule or the cost?
00:27:56
Speaker
and you kind of work through that process. So they they become very constructive processing. And I'd say these days rarely are those contentious conversations because everyone's got a shared goal, you know, at the end of the day to support the client and and help the client to deliver whatever project they're trying to yeah develop. um but I will say I have worked on some projects where it isn't as as corridor and Those tend to be smaller projects that are maybe not as well-funded or smaller companies, smaller developers trying to develop them that aren't as keen on adhering to all the environmental regulations. So they just want to get their project built. And sometimes they look at people like me as the problem. I'm the environmental guy telling me what I can't do. but that That happens for sure. But it's it's rare these days. Most of our clients, you know,
00:28:54
Speaker
These days, most big industries understand the importance of environmental stewardship, yes environmental protection, you know the potential long-term adverse impacts of climate change, what that means to their bottom dollar sometimes too.
Career Progression & Industry Insights
00:29:12
Speaker
So even if they don't purely agree about the scientific merit of something, they definitely agree that they' they're financial.
00:29:22
Speaker
uh, accounts may be affected by things. So, and you know, litigation is a big concern. So most of the big clients that we work for, they, they understand that they need to do this environmental due diligence and they need to do it right to get their project off off the ground in the right way. So they're very supportive of our time and fully embrace us. Well, that's good.
00:29:44
Speaker
You had talked to a little bit ago about how your pay structure is similar to that of an attorney's by either retainer or by project, etc. I'm not specifically asking you what you make, but if someone is listening and they're thinking about getting into this line of work,
00:30:01
Speaker
When you were doing those short term jobs and whatnot, was that typically a hourly wage for 40 hours a week? Or was that you'll be paid this much like a stipend or how, how does the pay early on start or work? And then how does it transition to like your current type job? Sure.
00:30:26
Speaker
Early on, before I was in consulting, when you're working those kind of temporary agency jobs, um the the pay is pretty terrible. Yeah, but you usually, you know, kind of a broke college kid and you can, yeah more of that, you're you're more interested in the experience that you're gaining and the opportunity.
00:30:46
Speaker
And if you're financially able to to you know make very little money and go live somewhere remotely and maybe maybe make a couple of great friends and do something interesting and build a resume, then those are fantastic opportunities. And i I would still recommend that young biologists coming out of college, think about that and maybe go that route because as someone who now you know years later is in the hiring process you know and I get to look at these resumes. Those are the kind of things that I look for. I want to see that someone's got some experience and they've maybe done a few different things and they're not just coming you know full force right out of college with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, but maybe absolutely no real world experience. so So those are great ways to to get into any any role in the sciences, I think, you know in the applied sciences, as we say, and which is kind of what I do.
00:31:40
Speaker
once and And those are low paying, they're usually a monthly stipend or allowance or a very, very small hourly rate for 40 hours a week. a short-term basis, you know maybe three months, six months. A lot of times it' it's during the field season, you know the growing season or the actual oh sure whatever species. Sometimes you know you're doing nest surveys for birds, for example, and that particular bird species only nests from mid-March to and early June. so It's a very short window to go out and you know do the studies, collect the data, and then do some reporting on the back end. They can be very short-term projects or they can be long-term
00:32:17
Speaker
When you get into consulting, we usually hire ah full-time permanent staff, salaried benefits, all of those things. And the the money is is much better than those temporary positions you know as you're you know kind of trying to get some experience. I think it's a very competitive industry, especially these days, because um the economy is strong. So there's a lot of growth and development across the US. And that means there there just needs to be more folks like us doing ah these impact and net assessments and environmental due diligence reports and field studies. So it can be challenging right now actually to just find good staff and hire them. So it's a great time, but that does fluctuate you know when when the economy is not so strong, you know the drop jobs start to slow up a little bit. But it's a stable industry that it's always going to be here. ah well I hope so.
00:33:12
Speaker
But yeah, the pay then goes up pretty dramatically, I would say. as you The longer you do it, as you get into more senior level positions and you're you're seen as a subject matter expert um or a technical expert, that's kind of where I'm at these days. You know you you do the job long enough, you really know of the ins and outs and and then you're brought on as an advisor to the client. So again, you're sitting at the table with the client telling them ah your thoughts on how the process should go, you know years in advance and And those positions definitely pay well. Your degree, now I forget that the exact timeframe. Was it about nine years between when you graduated from with your bachelor's to where you went and got your master's? Is that right? Uh, I think that's right. I started about seven years apart and then it takes a couple. Okay. Yeah, it's about, yeah, that sounds right.
00:34:06
Speaker
Would you recommend that if someone was, if you could go back and do it over again, would you just get your masters right from the get go? Or do you think it benefited you to go out and get some real world experience that then you could apply that experience and that knowledge to the masters to kind of further your learning? I don't know that I would recommend either approach. ah I mean, I've seen both approaches. You be very successful for folks.
00:34:37
Speaker
i I didn't stay in school a lot. I took a little bit of a gap because I wanted to work. And I always thought I would need to go back to graduate school. But you know after four years of college, I kind of wanted to break. I wanted to make some money. And and I wanted to just get get out there and get some experience and also figure out what I really wanted to do. Because what I wanted to study kind of changed over the years, you know whether it was more plant related or more wildlife related or this and that.
00:35:06
Speaker
So I think working for 70 years definitely helped me kind of hone in on what aspects of career and my career I really liked. And that was important, you know, because this is going to be my career, you know, for the rest of my life. I definitely think going back to school after working for seven years made me a much better student and grad school was a breeze. And I think that's maybe the one advantage of the folks who kind of stick around and, you know, do an undergraduate degree and then they stay and get their graduate, you know, their master's degree. I've i've heard seen and heard other folks maybe lament that a little bit. It's a little bit harder because they're just so burnt out on school at that point and always known as school. And I think working for seven years and kind of a high, I would say, consulting can be a little bit of a high stress environment because it's very fast paced. You learn how to become a really fast, efficient writer and you can write a lot and
00:36:02
Speaker
grad school is all about writing papers. so i felt like really I didn't feel like grad school was all that challenging when I got there. I don't know if you hear that very often. ah Yeah, I really enjoyed graduate school. and I was working a full-time job at the time and and actually had my first kid at that time. so it was Maybe I just don't remember because I was so sleep deprived.
00:36:26
Speaker
That's possible. What would you say if someone just came up to you on the street and said, what do you like most about your job? Can you sum that up in in one thing or are there multiple things that would compete for the top of the list? I think there's probably multiple things, but if you really wanted me to kind of be specific, I would say the diversity, the the project diversity, the work diversity.
00:36:53
Speaker
It's something different and new every day. And as someone who really needs a lot of diversity to get bored easily, that means a lot to me. Yeah, that makes total sense. It's not the same thing and it it brings a different level of excitement each time when you come in like, all right, we're on to a new thing now. It's not just Groundhog Day over and over for 30 years. so Yeah. Go ahead.
00:37:23
Speaker
Oh, I was just going to say, I, you know, kind of tied into that diversity is you, you get to travel a lot. So you're seeing a lot of different things, you know, getting projects are different every day. So you might be in a different state from one day to the next and working with a different species or a different aspect of the project. So you get, it's all tied together. It's just, it's, it's different and interesting all the time. If someone is a big time nature lover and loves to be outdoors, it sounds like your line of work is going to be of interest to them.
00:37:51
Speaker
I think so, yeah, yeah. most Most folks that are in this line of work, yeah, one you when you ask them to tell you a little bit about themselves, they kind of all blend into the same person after a while. yeah know They love to camp, they love to hike, they love dogs, they love to be outside. Yeah, yeah, pretty common trait. What do you, every job has good things and bad things, so what would you say that you dislike most about your job? If I'm being completely honest,
00:38:22
Speaker
Consulting can be a grind. yeah As much as I love that diversity, it's fast paced and our clients ah what want a lot from us. They want it fast. They want quick turnarounds. they're They're demanding. They're paying us a lot of money to give them what they need. So it can be a grind. And when you've done it for as long as I have, it's a long grind.
00:38:47
Speaker
so there There are definitely days where I'm a little tired and I could use a break and having having some time off of work is nice. But then you find a way to recharge a battery and come back. and and The reason I've been doing it this long is because of the diversity and the people too. I love the people. I've got a lot of great friends in this industry, but I do like still like being challenged every day on a different project that's new and not the same.
00:39:14
Speaker
Sure. Have there been any big technological changes or equipment or approaches?
Technological Evolution in Consulting
00:39:21
Speaker
I'm kind of thinking specifically about the tagging or the tracking type equipment that is used. Maybe it's no longer radio, but it's more GPS satellite type stuff. but Has there been anything that has really stood out to you in your industry that has changed in the time that you've been there, that you've kind of you've just seen it progress until now it's what we use every single day. But 15 years ago, it was cutting edge technology. Yeah, yeah, GIS for sure. Oh, okay. Yeah. Today, people will probably just assume GIS has been around forever, right? It's so common in everything we have to use within our pocket every day. When um when I started, you it was 20, someone odd years ago,
00:40:08
Speaker
yeah GIS was still you know you know that was early 2000s. It was still kind of expensive technology. It wasn't as precise or available as it is today. We used to rent these handheld GPS units that were very bulky. They weren't very sophisticated. You could collect ah you know a couple of data points in the field and tie them together with a line. and The process to to analyze that data on the back end, like ARPGIS, the software, that wasn't very well developed or advanced at that time, so pretty rudimentary. So when I first started, it's funny because I worked for a company that was very old. It was formed in the 1950s. It was kind of an old school mom and pop firm.
00:40:52
Speaker
And they had a lot of old reports and files and boxes, and I would look at those sometimes because we have to kind of refer back to an old project and see what had been done. And I pull out these hard copy reports and quite literally they would have photos that you would take on like a film camera and get them developed at Walgreens or um Walmart. They would take those photos and they would just, when they're writing the report in their Microsoft Word version, they would just leave extra space on the page and they would staple or glue the photo onto that page.
00:41:22
Speaker
And then that little would bind it and that would be a bound report. And that would be the product that they would give to the client. That's what the client was paying for. And I remember when I first saw those, I thought, this is the most bizarre thing. This seems so ridiculously cheap and old school. but and So anyway, um I say that because at that time we were using Microsoft Word to create maps. So we would literally scan a photo into Microsoft Word.
00:41:51
Speaker
which seemed to be excellent at the time. And then we would use the paint tools to draw lines over it and draw a polygon around the project side or put some points on where we found something interesting. And then yeah there's a whole lot of processing to just kind of save that and then and then export it as like a JPEG of an image and then get it into your report in Microsoft Word and then print that. So it looked pretty good on the back end when you printed it, but it was a lot of messy, you know very rudimentary processing on the front end to make that happen.
00:42:20
Speaker
And at the time we thought that was fairly high tech. And now everything is done in in ArcGIS and it's so simple. It's so slick and smooth and it's all tied to metadata and it's got a lot of like really important data had built into it. So like when I was looking back at those reports with stapled in you know photographs, that seemed really old school. And now when I look back at the way we used to make maps.
00:42:44
Speaker
That seems really old school and there'll be more. But yeah yeah, GIS is such an integrated part of our process these days and and the technology we use to collect the data in the field is so much more advanced. We use tablets now for everything. It's all tied so through the cloud.
00:43:00
Speaker
so In real-time, our GIS processors can be sitting quite literally. We have folks in India that can process the data as we're collecting it in the field from West Texas. and They're manipulating it and putting it into these different displays. and They can run analytics on it. geez buy things They can calculate things. They can spit out some some maps that we can then put in a report.
00:43:22
Speaker
<unk> Yeah, that that part of the puzzle is is much more advanced these days, and it seems like such a basic part of it, but we use it every single day. so i'd say That's probably the biggest advance, and there's been a lot of advances in like other aspects of tracking and monitoring and trapping and things like that. But quite frankly, at the end of the day, a lot of what we do as biologists is still you know just physically getting in the field and looking around with our eyes and making observations. and and studying things, but the data side, the GIS is definitely pretty important. the The technological side certainly streamlines things and makes it faster and more efficient and you have more data in the palm of your hand, but I still think you have to have human beings go and look at things and put their own eyes and their own hands on it to really complete the picture. yeah but I agree. and and then I think the next wave, and we're seeing it right now, is is drone technology.
00:44:18
Speaker
and Oh, sure. That's where people want that to go. they They want to be able to send a drone out and do the same survey that you know a couple of biologists would do, and this drone would fly around, capture all the imagery, and then report back to the GIS. It's integrated into yeah GIS, and then it can tell GIS exactly what it's seeing. you know It's all the elements that we do as biologists that I think I hope will will not ever be replaced by drones or AI, but they're certainly ah shift to try to make that happen. And that's probably the next big wave in our industry is you' just seeing drones and AI take a little bit more of the work we're doing from us, real humans.
00:44:58
Speaker
As you look back on your career from the very beginning when you got into it in college and then all the way to now, have you had any mentors or any teachers or supervisors, managers, et cetera, that either were a big impression on you, took you under their wing, that kind of a thing, and and they you really, you just gained a lot from them in your life?
Mentorship & Professional Growth
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.
00:45:25
Speaker
um My first consulting job when I was in Austin, there was a guy, Tom Budner, he worked in the geotechnical lab um in the same building I worked in. So i got I was out in the field most days doing studies and using the lab, doing other types of lab analyses. Yeah, I think you I worked with him for eight years while I was there. He he was a huge mentor mentor early on because you know partly I was fresh out of school
00:45:57
Speaker
relatively fresh. I was also new to Texas and Austin especially and I believe he gave just a lot of really great wisdom and insight into living in a different part of the world and seeing things differently and working for this kind of industry and how that might be different from other things I've experienced. So he was definitely an early mentor and I really appreciate the time I spent with him and think back finally on that.
00:46:26
Speaker
And then I worked on a long-term project out in California in the redwoods. I want to say that maybe around 2006. And I started working with this other PhD wildlife biologist. He was in our Colorado office, but we were all living in these little beach houses out on the Northern California coast for months doing you know rare plant surveys and wetland surveys up in the redwoods.
00:46:50
Speaker
Um, and he, he'd been in the industry a while and he was definitely, um, his name was Lou bridges. He was a really great mentor for a long time to just kind of helping him me see what the path looked like to become more professional, uh, how to be more handsome, how to be more analytical, how it all kind of tied together in the consulting world. You know, you're not just a scientist, but you're you're a consultant, you're advising clients, you're doing that in a certain way.
00:47:18
Speaker
And those two individuals were definitely early, you know very important mentors and in my yeah personal and professional development. People like that can teach you so much. You can get a lot from textbooks and classrooms and articles.
00:47:34
Speaker
But sometimes piecing all of that knowledge together and then how to apply it to your job or to your life experience is usually one of the best ways. If you can have someone to kind of show you how to take what you know, and then work with it, that, that sometimes is worth this weight in gold. Yeah, absolutely. I i couldn't agree more. i do Having those people you know in in your, in your world or in your orbit that care,
00:48:01
Speaker
That's important because not only are they showing you these things, but they care enough to show you these things. So they are helping you. There's a real fundamental part of that that I think is important when you, when you're taking someone over your your wing or they're taking you under their wing, there has to be some common trust and real concern and compassion and and the desire to kind of bring you up. Uh, so to speak. And I think that's a really cool element of any kind of mental relationship. Yeah, I agree.
00:48:29
Speaker
When, by the way, the redwoods, I've been up to the redwoods and the sequoias, and you can never convey the size of those trees to somebody until they just go and see them for themselves.
00:48:43
Speaker
You can tell them the base of this tree is bigger than your full-size truck and you can drive through one of them. and you know yeah i mean They look like a skyscraper made out of wood and you can say that and people are like, oh, that sounds cool. and Then you go there and you look up and it's like, good grief. This is a tree. so Anybody listening, you have to go there at least once in your life. but So impressive.
00:49:07
Speaker
I know if somebody wanted to get into your line of work, you you may have heard the term soft skills. What, what types of individuals, whether they're introverted, extroverted, mechanically inclined, you know, what type of a person or a skillset does well in your line of work?
00:49:30
Speaker
that That's kind of a broad question because there are a lot of different nuances to the kind of work I do. They gravitate a little more towards the planning side of of consulting, so they don't go out in the field as much. They're not what what I would say you know hard scientists.
00:49:48
Speaker
They're doing more of the data analysis, the desktop analyses and kind of planning projects from a different perspective, whereas the field scientists like myself and others are out getting hands dirty in one of the field and rough conditions. But I would say you know for folks that are in this in my line of work who want to do the kind of work that I do, I actually talk about this a lot with colleagues and because I i hire and manage staff, you know this topic comes up a lot. But if if I could you know just piece together the perfect person. I think having a real independent streak is great. The ability, the willingness to learn on your own, you know whether that's reading through the literature, or the scientific literature, or ah writing reports, being a great writer helps tremendously.
00:50:38
Speaker
Not being afraid to just put your own analysis on things, knowing full well that maybe you're a little bit experienced, but you know to take the initiative to do something, start to finish, write the report, make the interpretations that you would make, and then present that you know to more senior folks to provide some QA, QC. um That's huge. I see a lot of young folks that are just hesitant. you know they They don't exactly, they may be a little unsure of themselves, so they hesitate. And I really like to see people who are really ambitious, willing to do go out on a limb, willing to be a little bit vulnerable in that situation and and just kind of make a you know ah the best determination that they can. I think that's great. Being flexible is huge because a lot of times you're you're going from project to project to project. You might be on a flight to Seattle tomorrow. You might be a fight from on a flight from Seattle to Ohio two days later and then back to California. I mean, there's a lot of kind of crisscrossing, so flexibility is huge.
00:51:34
Speaker
adaptability is huge. I think folks that kind of, I don't want to single people out because I think this might single out a lot of people, but if you grew up in the country and you got some, you know, country skills and you can fix a few things that you can just kind of figure your way out. I think that's huge. That kind of, maybe we used to call that just, you know, common sense, but yeah.
00:51:55
Speaker
I think that's huge, that you know just having people that you can trust or rely on because you might be on a in the field, you might be in a remote part of the redwoods in the mountains where you don't have a lot of cell reception and you your truck stalls out or you have some other project problem or or heaven forbid somebody gets hurt and you got to kind of figure out how to you know get out of that situation pretty quick. And most of the time we plan well enough that these aren't life and death situations, but ah You still need to be able to figure it out without falling apart. Right. but That was a great answer. If you weren't in your current career, was there something that was always kind of rattling around in the back of your head that you thought, maybe I don't want to do that?
Alternative Career Aspirations
00:52:41
Speaker
And you look back and go, well, it probably wasn't a good fit, but I still think it would have been a cool career to have. Yeah, probably three. Okay.
00:52:52
Speaker
There's three that I think about a lot and I have thought about. I always thought I would love to be a farmer. I don't i don't really know what that means in my in my head, to be honest. I just thought it'd be great to just have a farm and just be a farmer. It seems like a good way to go. Maybe that's more of a retirement goal, I don't know. I also thought being a mechanical engineer would be great. Really thought about that, but my math skills aren't great.
00:53:20
Speaker
and I'm a person to get that. So I kind of early on said, you know what, maybe maybe engineering is not my way to go. But I think, yeah I think engineering and and kind of tinkering with things and fixing things and repairing things and coming up with new ideas. That was always something I was into as a kid. And then the third thing, the last thing was just a writer. I love writing. I always loved writing. I think I definitely could have really enjoyed a career as either a creative writer, a novelist, or maybe a journalist, you know, just traveling around the world and writing stories. Do you write anything? Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, they probably weren't great kids at the time and probably never will be, but don't think that that would happen.
00:54:03
Speaker
Well, writing is something that you can do pretty much in any of your downtime. You can do that, you know, long past retirement. Have you, have you written anything that's ever been published or do you have like a collection of short stories or a novel idea bouncing around in your head or. ah Yeah. I think anybody who, uh, answers himself a writer has some of those things bouncing around. Uh, I mean, I, I, I'll start with saying I write a lot, uh, for perhaps but they're technical reports. I write big, long technical reports all day, every day. And 10 years ago, I so did a lot more kind of you know personal writing outside of work, you know creative writing. I feel like these days I just write too much for work and it's hard to summon the creative juices sometimes.
00:54:54
Speaker
But yeah, I've definitely ah' written short stories. I had a couple of novel ideas that I worked on for a while. I tried to get a few little short stories and essays published in in certain publications that that do that kind of thing, you know, creative writing journals and stuff. Wrote a couple of little articles for the local newspaper, things like that. Had a couple small things.
00:55:18
Speaker
Not really published, but reviewed and kind of looked at. And you know I felt pretty good at least you know putting myself out there and trying to get something published. And then a lot of the technical stuff I i write for work it is published in the public domain. And those things are very, very much out there for anybody that you're going to find. But yeah, it's probably always been the one real thing in the back of my mind that I wanted to do, wanted to be good at. It takes a lot of nerve, I feel like, to put yourself out there and remember.
00:55:48
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, this has been an incredibly interesting conversation. I don't know much. I didn't know anything about your line of work, really. And I always do a little bit of research before I have a guest on. And I kind of knew, but it was you, you peeled back a lot of layers of the onion. And, you know, your brother is one of my best friends. And so I can tell you now that all the things he said about you are not true.
00:56:14
Speaker
ah You seem like a great guy, extremely intelligent. So he is wrong. And I told him I would say that. So yeah. Never believe. I know it. Hey, Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and and share your story and some expertise about your line of work for folks that may have some interest in that. It's been a great conversation and I hope you enjoyed yourself. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Tim. I do appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. It's been great getting to know you and hopefully there's some other young biologists out there that hear this and maybe sparked a little bit of passion for them to get into the industry. Hopefully you have somebody coming up applying for you in the future and they say, Hey, I heard you on the jobs podcast. And then you know, you, you made an impression. So there you go. Yep. That's all it takes. All right, buddy. Thanks a lot. You have a good day. Yeah, thanks. You too. Bye.
00:57:09
Speaker
And that wraps up another episode of the jobs podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hopefully you found that interesting. As always, I wait until the end of an interview to ask you to like, subscribe and share. I feel it's important that I earn that support from you. Thanks again, and we will see you on the next one.