The way I ended up here is certainly not the easiest one! :) Most ecologists study it in college, though there's a sizable (maybe 25%) self-taught minority, and I've never noticed any hesitation on anyone's part dealing with them. Tree-climbers have an informal apprenticeship system; I think it's usually about two years before you're considered ready to rig and climb on your own.
My education is somewhat more random; I studied visual arts and computer science, and worked as an artist or a programmer (depending on how hungry I was at the time) before joining the lab. My work here is in visualization - making computer generated images of the data that we gather up in the rainforest canopy. Humans are still much better at seeing patterns and connections that computers are - nobody has figured out how to put intuition into a program yet, and intuition is what makes science dance, when there's nowhere left it can walk to
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What a great job! I've wanted to do an art project of invisible things made visible by adding stuff - like what's going on in the sky during the day is invisible unless you add clouds. And how you can see the tempering in glass with polarized lenses. And magnetism . . .
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I've seen the aurora borealis -- years ago. It's magical.
And how did you get a job so very very cool? What kind of training went into it?
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My education is somewhat more random; I studied visual arts and computer science, and worked as an artist or a programmer (depending on how hungry I was at the time) before joining the lab. My work here is in visualization - making computer generated images of the data that we gather up in the rainforest canopy. Humans are still much better at seeing patterns and connections that computers are - nobody has figured out how to put intuition into a program yet, and intuition is what makes science dance, when there's nowhere left it can walk to ( ... )
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