Life after Grad School?

I had a discussion with my advisor a week ago concerning my thesis proposal and he said that I needed to expand my introduction to include an overview on why overfishing was an issue and examples of other specie-specific fisheries that have been overfished and the consequences because I need to frame my study into a larger picture because I'm not just becoming a specialist in lobster houses, but am part of a larger field of study, which is sustainable fishing. This discussion fit into the thoughts that I was having about what I wanted to do with my life and if my thesis project actually had any connection to it at all. Now I realize that it does. I came into my masters program wanting to focus on sustainable food production and I still am. : )

I did some research on possible jobs and opportunities that I would want after finishing grad school, I came across a fellowship for the FAO called the Junior Professional Programme in which candidates are assigned to an FAO headquarters or other offices for two years and is provided with a good salary and a mentor who works for the FAO. I even get bonus points because I come from an under-represented country (who would have thought?) and am a woman. However, I do not have more than one year of experience in a field relevant to the work of the FAO, only three months, but that could change by the time the application is due, which is August 31st! This would be my dream experience.

Continuing my quest for the possibility of life after grad school and employment opportunities for the Spring semester (to add to my experience for the FAO internship ; ) ), I came across a temporary job posting for a business called New York Sun Works, which is an organization whose goal is to improve "scientific literacy and environmental awareness by developing educational projects that sustainably produce food, clean water, and energy." The job posting was a temporary construction job to help build hydroponic and aquaponic systems on top of schools. I could hardly contain my excitement upon reading the post because it sounded like so much fun! : ) Last summer they built the Science Barge, which was called by the organization an floating urban agriculture experiment on which vegetables were grown hydroponically and was the first demonstration of high yield commerical grad urban food production with near zero net carbon emissions. However, this blog post makes a good argument against its sustainability. I am definitely going to apply, but don't know what the hours are going to be. My current class schedule leaves Thursday and Friday completely open, classes at 4 on both Monday and Wednesday, and class all day Tuesday, so technically I could work full-time if necessary.

Cooincidences continue. While I was looking for interesting classes to take, I came across an Architecture class called Life Support in which students design aquaponic systems. They even designed some of the systems used on the Science Barge! Sadly I e-mailed both the professors and the dean of the architecture school and they told me that I can't register for the class but I can sit in! It's 6-8 on Tuesdays, so I guess I'm not going to be enjoying happy hour after Con Bio seminars any more or Bhakti Club, but building aquaponic systems is better I think. : )

I am extremely excited for my classes for next semester because they are much more relevant to what I want to do than the classes I'm taking now, like Ornithology, and I expect them to be more engaging, unlike Payment for Ecoystem Services.

Classes for next semester include:

Global Food Systems- SIPA class that sounds extremely interesting. I wanted to take the Food and Globalization class taught by E3B but it conflicted with GIS.

Fundamentals of GIS- this class is supposed to have a huge time commitment, but GIS is a skill that every conservation biologist should have and its role in science is growing.

Latin American Poverty Laboratory- experimental course with invited speakers from the UNDP, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank that sounds fascinating.

Thesis Research- The writing continues...

Life Support-Sadly I'm only sitting in. : (

and of course the Research Seminar