校友焦点:Brendan Wiltse

Brendan Wiltse, 2007

I currently work as Science 和 Stewardship Director for the Ausable River Association. I am also an Adjunct Faculty member at Paul Smith’s College 和 am a professional l和scape 和 nature photographer. I serve on the board of The Waterman Fund 和 Adirondack Lakes Alliance, 和 co-founded Adirondack Wilderness Advocates.

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I came to Paul Smith’s College in 2005 as a transfer 学生 from Hudson Valley Community College. I was attracted to 宝盈bbin官方登录 because of the location, but most importantly the personal nature of the campus community. Right from the start, I realized my professors sincerely cared about my learning experience.

During my second semester I found myself in Curt Stager’s Paleoecology class. I immediately became fascinated with this field. At the same time I was taking capstone planning, 和 expressed an interest to Curt in doing a paleolimnological project. 我看得出他很担心, I was new to the school 和 had never had him as a professor before. He agreed, 和 suggested I assist him with a project he was working on in Africa. I declined, instead suggesting a project on Lake George, N.Y. I imagine Curt thought I was foolish to turn down such an opportunity. Working on a project in Africa was very appealing, but I wanted to conduct my own study from start to finish. The entire project ended up taking me a year 和 a half. 在那段时间里, I found myself scuba diving in Lake George to hammer core tubes into the lake bottom, 只是为了让他们陷入困境. Sorry Curt, I still owe you several hundred dollars for that mistake.

I spent weeks in the lab learning to identify diatoms, 和 then counting hundreds of them under a microscope. And I poured over Thomas Jefferson’s journals, trying to find any passing observation of Lake George. Whatever apprehension Curt had in the beginning eventually faded away. He became intrigued enough by the project to pay to obtain Lead-210 和 Carbon-14 dates on the core. We eventually published the results as an article in the Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies. And like almost every research project, our work on Lake George created more questions than answers. Curt has since received an NSF grant to further explore some of the intriguing findings from Lake George. The project also solidified my interest in paleolimnology, which eventually brought me to the Paleoecological Environmental Assessment 和 Research Laboratory at Queen’s University in Canada as a Master’s, 最后是Ph值.D. 学生. Recently, the entire experience has come full circle. 我现在正在合作, 和 publishing research with Curt that is answering some of the questions my capstone project raised.

How has your time at Paul Smith’s shaped the person you are today 和 how you approach work/life?

Paul Smith’s primarily shaped my views towards education 和 learning. 当我开始上女王大学的时候, I was afraid that I would be behind my fellow graduate 学生s because I was coming from a small college. 我的同龄人都上过名牌大学, which provided them access to 和 experience with equipment that isn’t available at Paul Smith’s. 随着时间的推移，这种恐惧逐渐消失了. I realized that what Paul Smith’s may have lacked in high end laboratory equipment, it more than made up for in the quality of the professors. I found that some of the classes I took at Paul Smith’s covered material in greater depth 和 detail than my graduate classes. This by no means is meant to suggest the graduate courses at Queen’s are lacking, but that the upper level courses at Paul Smith’s hold 学生s to a high bar.

也许最重要的是, it was what I learned outside of the classroom through developing relationships with my professors that taught me the most. 走廊里的讨论, 自助餐厅, 图书馆, 和 elsewhere elucidated concepts 和 ideas that aren’t possible to develop in a class room. It was also through the mentorship I received, 并继续收到, from my professors that defined my Paul Smith’s experience, 在很多方面塑造了今天的我. As an Adjunct Faculty member at Paul Smith’s I don’t have the time to develop the same types of relationships with my 学生s, but I hope that in some small way I help provide them a similar experience.