Well, I’m trying to impart to my students that are nature challenged and technologically savvy, that there’s a whole world out there, that in order to be a biologist, you don’t have to be in a lab and wear a lab coat, that there’s a whole other world out there… Read More
And I presume you do give advice, but what kind of advice would you give a student interested in the career working with animals are at a zoo society or the zoo, what would you say to them. I’d say to them all complete your degree. In this day and… Read More
Within the last week, I got an electronic message from a former student who was very interested in being involved in zoos and wanted to be an animal keeper or an animal caregiver. She didn’t care where it was, this was her life dreams. I encouraged her, we talked in… Read More
Whenever I was down, you always came along and gave me a boot.” And she said, “I’m really living my dream.” And she said, “I’m hoping that at the end of summer, that they will find me invaluable and give me a full-time position.” And I wrote back and said,… Read More
And I said, and I’d like to use my experience at the zoo as well as my field research. And he said, okay, put a syllabus together, put a course proposal together, get it back to me. Let me take a look at it. We’ll talk about it in the… Read More
They’re always upperclassmen or graduate students. It’s changed very little in terms of the basic premise of animal adaptations. But obviously it’s changed because the resources are so much more available to us now than they were all that time ago. Read More
Do you think that that now is helping your teaching of this as a significant force in conservation or what are you trying to impart to your students?… Read More
About the time that I completed my PhD and I didn’t think I was any different, but it made a difference to some people and made people, it made a difference to a lot of people but I have no idea why, I still got up in the morning, same… Read More
How do animals fit into their environment?… Read More
How do animals mesh with their environment?… Read More
I need to be able to look at questions or problems or unknowns, particularly in science and then consequently in life in a different way than I had in the past. And the PhD did that for me, both because of my exposure to people that were in the same… Read More
Let me just see if I’m, you said University of Illinois, but are we saying University of Illinois or DePaul?… Read More
No, I got my PhD, my PhD came from the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Read More
And then back to your, back to the original thought or the original question was how did you form your association with DePaul?… Read More
And if you take it on, you’re taking it on yourself because we can’t, it’ll interfere with your job. We can’t, you’re setting a precedent. This is not a good precedent for staff here.” So I said, okay, I’ll do whatever I needed to do. So essentially, during that time,… Read More
Somebody was studying quaker parakeets. Somebody was studying flower beetles. Somebody was studying tree growth. It was a wonderful collaboration. We were all in the same lab. And I would use my free time, and I worked for that three years. I essentially worked every weekend and every holiday with… Read More
It was just one of those things that we didn’t really negotiate. It was just one of those things that worked out. Les said you gotta do your job, I did my job. Les said, you can’t have the time, I had the time. So I used my time, it… Read More
And he says, you got any interest in doing a PhD?… Read More
And he says, you know, you can pick your topic and you can, I don’t know, you can do whatever you want. He said, it won’t cost you anything, he said, but it will be a huge benefit to me because it’s a kudo for me, it’s stripes on my… Read More
So instead of spending five years or spending seven years as most do, because I had a head start on it, and because I had an empathetic ecologist advisor at the university, he and I agreed to three years. And at the end of three years, my field work would… Read More