“Hot dog! Looks like you’ve got a Mahonia repens,” Sherel exclaimed in his rural Utah twang. I crouched and gently touched the plant with yellow flowers by my feet. “This one here? How can you tell it’s a Mahonia?” Sherel carefully bent down and adjusted his camo hat to block the Sun. The 75-year-old botanist and leader of our field crew paused briefly to admire the plant before launching into an energetic description of its defining features. That evening, watching the Sun fade behind the mountains, I texted my childhood friend. “Day 1 was actually kind of fun,” I started, “but we’ll see how long it takes before I get bored from just identifying plants in the field all day.”
Up to that point, I had avoided fieldwork. To an undergraduate studying ecology, bending over plants for 10 hours a day seemed a lot less interesting than identifying big-picture trends in large data sets. But I knew potential graduate schools would likely view my lack of field experience as a hole in my resume, and my mother thought I should work for a few years to explore my interests before pursuing further education. So, I applied to field-based summer positions after graduation and landed a job assessing sage grouse habitat in Utah. It felt like a necessary evil before I could move on to bigger, more “intellectual” things.
When the summer was over, I found myself in another field job, this time surveying forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One frozen morning a few weeks in, I came across a strange wasp probing the bark of a decaying beech with what looked like an enormous stinger, 10 centimeters long. Our official duties didn’t extend to insects, but my curiosity was piqued. “Hey, come check this out!” I called to the rest of our field crew, instinctively channeling Sherel’s tireless enthusiasm. Despite the cold, we watched transfixed by this otherworldly insect, which my colleague identified as a giant wasp laying eggs, until it slowly pulled back its ovipositor, stretched, and flew off. As we dispersed back to our tasks, I noticed migrating sandhill cranes flying overhead and thought of their cousins in northern Utah. I sent silent thanks to Sherel for teaching me to approach fieldwork with a sense of wonder—excited to learn, even when my hands are numb.
I’m now a third-year Ph.D. student in forest ecology, and the time I spend leading research crews in the woods of New Hampshire every summer is one of my favorite parts of the year. Our crews typically don’t have previous field experience, and I try to bring Sherel’s excitement to our work. By answering questions with enthusiasm, sharing interesting tidbits, and providing the intellectual context behind our efforts, I hope to show that working in the field can be fascinating and fun.
My younger self would have been surprised: It’s when I’m not in the field that it can sometimes be difficult to remain energized about my work. It’s not just being immersed in nature that I miss. Fieldwork may be buggy, wet, and physically taxing, but collaborating with others helps keep spirits high, and the physical activity helps me stay sharp. Much of my Ph.D. work, on the other hand, is solo and sedentary. So I’ve tried to bring aspects of fieldwork to my day-to-day routine. I take breaks to talk to other graduate students to escape intellectual ruts, and I try to get up from my desk and move for a minute or two throughout the day.
I also try to recapture fieldwork’s spirit of discovery by reading a journal article that excites me, regardless of the topic, every Monday. If I’m bogged down by the repetition of analyzing another data set, this helps restore my curiosity and enthusiasm for my work. And when I remember that gleam in Sherel’s eye as he responded to my seemingly mundane, random questions, I remind myself that any task can present an opportunity to learn—as long as I am open to it.
- aum and franco46
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