On Wednesday, October 4th, I met with one of my peer mentors, Michelle. She is a second year ENR Scholar from Texas and is majoring in Natural Resource Management with a Sustainable Agriculture specialization. Michelle is a very outgoing and approachable person, and I was very excited to interview her for this assignment.
We met for dinner at the Union and ended up talking for around two hours. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that we are very similar in many ways! I talked to Michelle about various things under the areas of Academics, Involvement, ENR Scholars, Careers, and General Advice.
Michelle came to Ohio State as a Natural Resource Management major. She knew that she wanted to be involved with environmental issues, however she wanted to deal with the people side of these issues rather than the strictly science side. This is why she chose NRM rather than Environmental Science or FFW. She realized this during high school when she took AP Environmental Science and when she worked at an outdoor school in Maryland during the gap year she took before attending Ohio State. She also realized this when she worked at an environmental testing lab in high school and hated it. She would just prepare samples, test them, and record results she didn’t understand, and realized this is also why she didn’t want to major in pure Environmental Science. She decided on Sustainable Agriculture when she found out that farmers are starving in the developing world, and wanted to be able to make a difference.
I was super interested in the internship and job she had during her gap year. During the fall she was hired as an intern, and in the spring she was hired as an employee. She worked with middle school age children, which she did not initially think she would enjoy, and had so much fun. She planned classes and taught lessons depending on what the school coming wanted them to teach. We both talked about our experiences with environmental education, as I also have been teaching children about the environment and nature for a few years during the summer. As she was explaining all of this to me, her face was just completely lit up and reiterated how happy she was at the end of almost every sentence. I want to be able to talk about my career or job like that one day.
Her ideal dream job is to work with governments of countries to set up education workshops for sustainable agriculture, and if the farmers adopt these practices they get subsidies from the government. She also knows that there are some organizations that already do this, so she thinks she can maybe work with one of those companies.
Michelle is involved in the Forestry, Fisheries, and Wildlife Club, which is the student chapter of the national societies. She isn’t positive how relevant it is completely to her interests, as they talk about hunting and trapping, but she is happy she is a member. She also wants to join a club where they eliminate poverty through entrepreneurship next semester when she has more time to dedicate to a club. She wants to join this club because the objective is the point of her specialization – as a farmer you are an entrepreneur of your crops.
Additionally, we talked about ENR Scholars specifically. Michelle really enjoyed being able to live with so many people who shared common interests with her. She said that all of her best friends are from ENR Scholars, and even though this year they all live on opposite sides of campus they hang out all the time. She also stressed how many opportunities there are through Scholars and how easy it is to take advantage of them. She said to make use of and connect with the guest speakers that come to ENR Scholars class. She also said that one of her favorite events is when she got to tour a Maple Sugar Farm where she got to see people harvest sap and got to hold a baby goat at the petting zoo. She also said to take advantage of meeting with Esther and Amanda during the school year and that they are a great resource.
Her words of advice were to show up to class and participate as much as possible, especially during my first semester. Also, that freshman year is hard and does feel horrible a considerable amount of the time. I really appreciated her honesty when I asked this question. She said that what no one told her was that it was okay for it to be horrible, especially because everyone else is having a horrible time but no one ever addresses it. She said that everyone seems fine until around November, and that’s when things start to fall apart for everyone. Everyone is most likely feeling as awful as I am, so it’s okay to talk about things to my friends. She said that it’s hard, but it’s okay to be hard. Everyone expects college kids to automatically know what they’re doing as soon as they move out, but we don’t! She said that it’s really okay for me to not know what I’m doing; and it’s going to take time. One of her words of advice that really hit me was that it’s really okay not to feel “okay” all the time. There is such a stigma of being “okay” all the time, and it’s really okay not to be. Additionally, she said that school doesn’t get easier, you just get more used to it. I really needed to hear this advice that day; I had been having a pretty bad couple of weeks and needed to hear from someone that it was normal for me to be feeling this way.
We talked for around two hours and I left the interview feeling much better than when I walked into it. I have taken all of Michelle’s advice to heart and it has helped me decide on the major I want to switch to, dealing with stress, and getting through college while taking advantage of all the opportunities OSU has to offer. I’m very glad I talked to Michelle and hope to hang out with her again soon!
