The SFS Visiting Alumni Program provides alumni who are established in their careers with the opportunity to return to an SFS Center and interact with faculty members and current students. SFS alumni are well-positioned to give current students insight into environmental career paths and to be an important resource to students as they contemplate the next step in their lives. If you are interested in participating in the SFS Visiting Alumni Program, please fill out this questionnaire.

For more information, contact Marta Brill, Alumni and Parent Relations Coordinator at mbrill@fieldstudies.org.


An SFS Alumna Returns to Warrawee

Last April I returned to "Warrawee," also known as the SFS Center for Rainforest Studies in Australia, a place that changed my life both personally and professionally eighteen years ago. It's hard to believe that many years have passed! When I drove down that long driveway, which seemed longer than I even remembered it, I couldn't stop smiling. I felt the energy that I'd felt the first time, the excitement of opening the door to a new chapter in my life at the time. It had been such an incredible time, so rich in all the knowledge and experiences and friendships gained. I had just emerged from a difficult childhood filled with a lot of struggles, and much of what I gained there was not immediately obvious, but there is no doubt it was a major turning point in my life.

My experience at Warrawee reconnected me to the memories of my time living with my father in a hippie log cabin with no running water. Back then in the 1970's, we grew a big veggie garden, and I ran around outside all the time. Warrawee was a similar rustic experience, especially back in 1990 with no internet yet!  We lived in cabins with other students, the same ones that are still standing, but we only had cold showers. We did a lot of work around the property. And we spent a lot of time outside including lectures in the forest, dining at the long picnic tables that are still there, and doing the research project that inspired my love of science. Two other students and I designed a study (along with help from Center Director Dr. Bill Laurance) to figure out how the driveway, an old logging road, affected the movements of four small mammal species. We'd get up at dawn and check traps and never knew what lurked inside. Besides the four species of rodents, once we caught a lace monitor and once an antechinus, also known as a marsupial mouse.

I loved Australia so much I did not want to return home immediately and ended up traveling for two months after the semester ended (much to my mom's horror, she thought I'd never go back to college and kept asking me when I was coming back to the "Real World"!) But return I did, and I earned my B.S. and M.S. in wildlife ecology at Texas A&M University. My SFS experience inspired me to change my major from pre-med to wildlife ecology, which suited me much better. But it wasn't until after I graduated, met the man who would become my husband, and had my second child that I ended up teaching myself how to be a freelance writer, specializing in conservation and wildlife issues. I'd never taken a journalism class in my life and had no intentions of becoming a writer, but it all fell into place. I built my career using the education I had in wildlife ecology as a backbone, and then I read every book I could find on writing and publishing in magazines.

Now, thirteen years after I started my career, I support myself full-time writing and photographing as a single mom. I've published in magazines such as Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Scientific American, Backpacker, and OnEarth, and I'm a contributing writer for Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine. I also write for Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. I live in Houston now, but I get to travel the world! In the past couple of years, I've been on writing assignments to the Peruvian Amazon (a dream come true after studying rainforest ecology!), the Galapagos, Nepal searching for red panda. My latest adventure sent me shark diving and reporting for Discovery Channel during the filming of a Shark Week documentary, the assignment that brought me back to Australia. I also teach an online writing course so that others, many of whom have backgrounds in science, can learn what it takes to write for magazines, whether you want to publish a single essay or try to make a career of it (Information is online at www.wendeeholtcamp.com/nature.htm).

During my April visit, SFS Intern Jill Mueller took me on a hike around the site and it brought back so many wonderful memories. I remember swinging through the vines of the rainforest, climbing the hollow strangler fig, and bonfires on the hill. I only stayed overnight, but I gave a talk to the current students about my career and how SFS had changed my life. After the months studying and traveling in Australia, I came back and earned straight A's for the rest of my time in college! It also helped me find "myself" and know what I love, namely the outdoors, the environment, wildlife, and a life of adventurous travel. It took me a while to make it all come together, but it did. Everything works out in time if you follow your dreams.

Scuba photo shown above is Copyright © 2008 John Rumney.