An Internship With Envirotactics

An Inter nship with Envirotactics

Ryan Layden

To kick off this season of The Trail, I would like to give a bit of insight into the wo r l d o f i n t e r n s h i p s a n d j o b opportunities. At the end of spring, I began an internship at Envirotactics, an environmental consulting company in New Jersey. Throughout the summer I worked on a wide variety of projects such as site remediation work, population studies, wetland delineations, and CAFRA permitting.Prior to this internship, I was under the impression that any career involving ecological studies and soil sampling required a physical science degree. As I approached the end of the summer, I came to the realization that this is simply not the case. Lab experience isn’t necessarily required in this line of work, and each task more so required on the job training as opposed to academic experience. The moral of the story is, I was lucky enough to be offered a full-time position upon graduation, where I would be doing work I thought I was never qualified to do. A piece of advice I would give to my peers is to expand the range of opportunities you believe are applicable to your major. In many cases, the connections you make and the effort put forth, outweigh the specifics of your degree.