Externship + Echidna = New Plan

I quite liked talking in undergrad, and writing and design and all those communication skills that were then ground into paste by several years at vet school, where I was surrounded by people smarter, more experienced, and more committed to saving animals. It's not that I don't like saving animals, I am very much in favor of cows and I have great love for emergency medicine (finally, a job compatible with my sleep schedule!).

Then, during fourth year, I went to Australia. My determination to travel abroad manifested in a two week visit to the land down under, where I just saw the nice parts (Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra) and spent a week with smart, experienced people committed to learning about and, where possible, saving wildlife. I like wildlife on principle and in practice, though I suspect regurging seabirds is not in my future. But there were so many places it overlapped with human health: oysters as environmental harbingers of water quality, bats and birds and little predators as pest control, and the Great Barrier Reef as a rather troubling indicator of degraded ecosystems. Yet at the same time, intense frustration with the media and with human beings in general for not recognizing the importance of these environmental markers.

Oh look, said a little voice in my mind, a niche! Because I'm always trying to work communication science into my ambiguously defined career.

And then I saw echidnas eagerly waiting for play time with the keeper at the Melbourne zoo, and hey, if there is a job where I get to travel to random places and see things like that, AND use communication science, AND the principles of veterinary medicine, I want to do that.

Fortunately I'd already applied for the masters of public health program. Even better, I got in.

Of course, now I have a ton of essays to write on the human health care system, which has nothing to do with echidnas.