My name is Cam and I’m your forestry career liaison. Since you’ll be talking to me about jobs in forestry, you may want to know a bit more about who I am.
I grew up in the booming metropolis once known as Hay City, and now known as Olds, Alberta. You may know Olds as the bustling town of thousands that has a Wal-Mart, Boston Pizza and a fancy new Ramada hotel with a water slide. When I was growing up, the most exciting thing that happened to that town was the opening of the McDonalds that was attached to the Co-Op grocery store. If you didn’t grow up in rural Alberta, it may not seem like there’s much to do in a small town. It’s a pretty well kept secret that people who grew up in a community the size of “ol’ Hay City” know how to make their own good time.
Yes, there’s a place called the Cow Palace in the middle of town.
My weekends in high school were spent outdoors. My friends and I would usually drive to the nearby mountains to snowboard and we seemed to always be camping, fishing, jumping in lakes, wakeboarding, wandering the forests on backpack trips, and generally just enjoying nature. Sometimes after school we would head over to a friend’s acreage and do stuff like pull a canoe across a frozen lake with a ski-doo, shoot potato guns or work on a quad that we knew we could never get started. Basically, we did everything you could never do in the city and it was awesome.
Now THAT’S a potato gun.
I always knew I loved the outdoors and felt a connection to the land, but it wasn’t until later in life that I realized that my “love and connection” with nature was actually a job description. A job description for a forester. After this revelation, I went to the University of Alberta and registered in the BSc in Forest Management program. My University summers were spent on the mountains making sure trees were planted correctly, laying out cut-blocks, ensuring trees were growing and generally just playing around (safely) in the forest. The best part was I got paid for it, a wage better than any of my friends. After graduating, I was hired as a Planning Forester for a consultant company in Edmonton called Silvacom, where my role was to plan harvest and reforestation activities.
Working in forestry gives me the lifestyle I want and a meaningful job where not just people, but also the environment, depend on me. Maybe there’s a place for you in this industry too.