Rogat+-+Joellen+Lampman+Talk+with+SC+Class

Michelle Rogat Joellen Lampan, formerly of Audubon International, now working for Cornell with IPM, came to Sustainability Careers class to talk about her career path and answer any questions for the class.

__Notes__ When Joellen came to speak to my class she went through her career path starting from when she was in middle school.
 * She spoke of how she had told her counselor that she wanted to be a vet or a forest ranger and she was shot down. He told her she didn't have the grades to be a vet and she couldn't be a forest ranger because she was a woman. To this day she couldn't believe that she had to experience that, that a school counselor told a student that, she wasn't that old so it wasn't like it was that long ago.
 * She told us a story of how her first experience with environmental education was when she would explain to her family and friends what Touch-Me-Nots were. They are these plants that grow along rivers and streams that produce this kind of pod that contain a sort of spring and seeds inside. When you touched or pinched them they would burst open. I have very found childhood memories of playing with Touch-Me-Nots and showing my friends and family as well.
 * She was first an animal/vet technician (?), but she found she wasn't very fulfilled and happy with her job. She was missing that educational component. So she went to work for other places, was a teachers aid, helped run an educational camp, then at some point went back to Cornell for more environmental studies.
 * At some point she went to work for Audubon and focused a lot on the Cooperative Sanctuary Program for Golf Courses. **She found that her job was mainly an educational one because she would show these property and land owners to widen their scope of sight to see what they were missing and to teach them** **what they didn't know about their landscape and managing it.**
 * She had recently gotten asked by many peers to apply for a job opening at Cornell in their integrated pest management (IPM) program, and there was also another job opportunity for her elsewhere. The other job would have been easy, fun, and paid well, and she still would have been able to wear her jeans to work! BUT, it wouldn't have been as fulfilling as the Cornell job in the sense that she felt she had the most unique and almost perfect career experience that would allow her give more input and insight than anyone else could. **She chose the Cornell job because she felt nobody else could do that job the way she could and so she owed it to herself and others, I guess that environmental and sustainable community in a sense, to apply for the job and take it. She said that this was where she felt that she could make more of a difference and impact in the world, and so she her choice was decided.**
 * My professor asked her if she had ever dealt with situations where she might have been viewed as that insane and hysterical woman crying her heart out about Mother Earth, and if so how much did she feel her gender played a role and her environmental interests play a role? She answered that she wasn't really sure if her being a woman had any affect, but that being an environmentalist did give her that image of a treehugger and that she was a little out there. But there was this sense of understanding in the field that people would come to expect and accept that image and not really address it once they were working with her on a project. (I WONDER WHAT NATE'S THOUGHTS WERE ON HER RESPONSE AND WHAT DID HE TAKE AWAY FROM HER ANSWER - ASK HIM)