It’s Still Work If You Love It
My dream job turned out to be a painful wake-up call
I’m currently reclined on my couch with a pillow meticulously placed under my lower back. It’s the position I’ve been stuck in for over two months. My sister invited me for a sleepover at her apartment tonight, but I don’t know if my back can survive the 1-hour drive to her place. I’m stir-crazy and frustrated and exhausted from the near-constant pain I’ve been in these past two months. I’ve got a bulging disk in my lower back, and what’s more frustrating than the injury itself is how I got it.
I’m a wildlife biologist and I love it. My career is one of the most important things in my life, and I would never choose to do anything else. The tough thing is — and you may have noticed this already — capitalism doesn’t care much for the environment. Climate change has pushed more young people into this field as we realize the need for it, but our government and big business don’t yet share the same sentiment, so the industry remains severely underfunded. And recent economic crises, like COVID-19, have caused even more funds to be diverted away. In short, we’ve now got more wildlife biologists and fewer wildlife biology jobs.
So it’s no surprise that it took years of unpaid internships for me to get my first paid wildlife biology position this summer, as a…
