As such, I then decided to become a NY Environmental Conservation Officer (E.C.O.), which required two years of higher education, so I enrolled in a community college when I returned from the military in 2012. The military also paid for my college education via the G.I. Bill.
During the course of my education, I did a "ride-along" with an E.C.O. and realized that the job is mostly paperwork and waiting around, and is not as interesting as I had hoped. At the same time, I was taking an intro biology course, and I thought it was mostly boring until we started to touch on aspects of ecology. This was the first time I realized you could study stuff like this, involving interactions between living and non-living things. I found ecology and its related fields to be engrossing, and I quickly exhausted all the ecology courses they were able to give me at this community college, so I decided to follow my interests and transfered to a four-year State University of New York (S.U.N.Y.) school. I took every ecology course I could register for at S.U.N.Y. Plattsburgh, and eventually became involved with research. During my first summer as a research technician, it dawned on me that this was actually a viable profession; I could make a living generating and disseminating ecological knowledge, and it was something I was actually interested in and good at. That was the first moment I considered a Ph.D., but only insofar as it was necessary to get a Ph.D. in order to do research for a living. I find this to be an important distinction, because the most successful graduate students aren't here to get a Ph.D., they're here because it's on the way towards their real goals.
