Niguidula+Update+February+22,+2015

This past week did not go according to plan, but in a good way. I ended up landing two interviews on Wednesday, including my first interview with a government official. Leslie Surprenant is an New York DEC employee working in the Invasive Species Coordination Unit in the Division of lands and forests. She was kind enough to send me another potential contact in one of the pre-interview e-mails. The questions I prepared for her were mainly adapted from the interview questions I have posted previously for researchers. I am not sure that I was completely prepared for the interview with regards to the questions asked, but then again I'm not sure what else I could have done. From the interview it quickly became clear to me that I had almost no clue how the government dealt with invasive species. Fortunately, Leslie was happy to explain it to me and gave me quite a bit of material to look over. During the interview and after, she was also kind enough to provide useful links and a few more potential contacts. The second interview was with Dr. Jeremy Farrell, who I have worked with previously. Jeremy, as he prefers to be called, is a postdoc researcher at the Darrin Freshwater Institute and, unlike Dr. Lister, has a good deal of direct research experience with invasive species. Most of his experience comes from projects that the DFWI has been involved with, notably Eurasian milfoil and Asian clams. He, like Dr. Lister, does believe in the general concept of desired natures and would like to see researchers be a little more objective. Interestingly, he thinks this view is prevalent among researchers, which is in direct contrast to the literature I have read.