Josh Heaton

Joshua Heaton and Astrid

Hi everyone!

Today I wanted to introduce one of our graduate students. They come from across the country looking for adventure, experience and a Masters of Natural Resouces. Many of their degree credits come from experience gained as instructors in the McCall Outdoor Science School. 

Josh is one of our off-campus graduate students who, oddly enough, spent the first two weeks of Fall orientation living in a two-person tent in Ponderosa State Park! I guess you could consider him lucky since he learned all about plants, animals, and different ecosystems in the park, then got to go home and experience it all first hand (how cool!). Eventually, Josh moved into a quirky little cabin down the road from campus that he shares with his wife Alexis, and his dog Astrid.

Josh’s naturalistic and philosophical points of view have had a huge impact on fellow graduate students and on our K-12 students. Whether it involves identification, medicinal uses, or traditional uses Josh loves teaching students about the plants found in PSP. Josh believes that his foundational plant knowledge is what drives his ambition to teach this topic, but that the graduate program has really emphasized his “hard-science” knowledge and made teaching this topic more fun and interesting!

Josh joined our graduate program in hopes of pursuing a master’s degree that would provide him a broad education to parallel his vocational interests. He explained to me that his family members all had specific degrees that limited their career options, and for someone who has a tremendous amount of interests, he just needed something more than that. Josh loves that the graduate cohort is full of people from diverse backgrounds. He was a bit intimidated coming into a science program with only a naturalist background, but he soon realized that the diversity of backgrounds is what makes everyone belong here. Our graduate program has already greatly impacted Josh and he still has a whole semester ahead of him:

“...it has opened my eyes to a whole world I didn’t know existed. I thought science was this very boring, sterile thing, where you just do your research, submit your paper, and get it published all while sitting in a desk. This program made me realize that science is a much more broad and colorful world that I can actually have a place in.”

Check back next week for more insider notes!

Cheers,

Ellie