I like to go hiking and back-packing and observe wildlife. Now when I go into the woods I look at nature and the environment in a different way. Before I could go out into the woods and say "Yeah, there's wildlife out here." Now when I walk out there I'm sort of forced to say well, this is the habitat of this species... what's this habitat going to look like in 25 years... what's going to be here... what happens if we burn this habitat... what happens if we do selective cutting... Before I took it all for granted and now I take it as a way of life.

I was a bouncer at a restaurant and bar. I really liked that job -- it was very stimulating to me. It wasn't always the money, cause I always had enough money... I was just out to work two or three part-time jobs just to keep busy, just to keep stimulated. You never knew what kind of excitement was going to happen that night. You had to be able to react to whatever kind of semi-violent situation.

I enjoy woodworking. At the [restaurant] another guy and I refurbished the whole place. We stripped all [the trim], built oak tables and oak chair rails all around the inside and from that I picked up a lot of skills for woodworking. Right now I just play around with woodworking. I'm always trying to build a better bird box or I try to build a better bird feeder.

Where we grew up we had some open fields and some hard wood forests that were nearby. My brothers and all the other kids in the neighborhood, we used to always go in the woods and play. And, as any other kid, you follow the interests of the older ones. The guy down the street was an avid hunter and fisherman so then I became one. You end up spending a lot of time out in the woods and you associate a good time with the woods.

When I was about twenty years old this guy asked me, "Do you like what you're doing?" I said, "Yeah" -- I was working on a construction job -- you're young then and you're strong and you're thinking it's really neat to swing a sledge hammer and carry things up and down stairs all day. He said, "If you like what you're doing today, can you still be doing it when you're forty?" And then he said, "Remember, you can make more money with your mind than you can with your back."

I was assistant general manager at a family run dinner theater. I knew in the position I was in at the time, I couldn't go any higher. So, one day I seriously sat there and said, "Well, I really don't want to be here for the rest of my life." I had been up to the White Mountains and thought I'd really like to go back there someday. I had no idea that there were biologists out there who manage and manipulate the wildlife species and the habitats they live in. Then I was in a bookstore and I picked up a reference for college majors and I saw Wildlife Management in a whole list of majors. And I said, "Wow... that sounds like something I'd like to do." I decided to go back to school and get a degree in Wildlife Management -- so here I am -- in my last semester.

I'd like to find a job as a research wildlife biologist for some type of state or federal agency. Many of the people who do work with some of the state agencies are very far detached from any type of field work with wildlife; they're more into the policy part. I don't know whether I can actually sit at a desk and go to meetings 3 or 4 times a week.

Sometimes [school] gets very overwhelming. I always have to ask myself, why it is that I'm here and keep reminding myself that there're going to be greater rewards afterwards for the work I put into it. Before I came back to school, I was bitter because people had things that I didn't have -- a good house, or a good job, or a nice car. But now I've lost that bitterness because I realize that unless they got it through some other way, they earned whatever they had through working hard, going to school, getting a good education, and they had the job because they worked hard. I guess we grow all the time -- even though we think we're grown up, we grow.