Continuing Education

I love learning and figuring stuff out. Part of my job that is cool, is that each site is different, and whether it's wetlands or surveying, I am researching, investigating, learning, exploring,  calculating and drawing conclusions for each job.

As part of keeping my licenses up to date and current, I am required to have a certain amount of hours or credits for each license biennially.  My Wetland Scientist License is up for renewal at the end of September and for some reason, I haven't been very good at enrolling in wetland classes lately. It goes in cycles; for a while I studied just survey related stuff, then I just studied  stuff that related to wetlands (that counted for both licenses, thank goodness) Now I need CEU's for my designers licensed as well. (new rules)

So Staring earlier this week, I've been doing some intensive class taking, which will extend into October actually.

My class schedule is :

Co-occurrence and Habitat mapping at UNH 7/28/09 - Completed & pretty cool. all new stuff to me;  Ferns at Wildcat, Boxford, MA 7/30/09 - Completed. Great class; Fern ID Workshop, Fox State Forest, Hillsborough, NH, 8/7/09; Beaver Ecology and Control Workshop, Hillsborough, NH, 8/14/09; Late Season Sedges and Rushes, Mt. Wachusett Community College, Gardener MA, 8/28/09; Intermediate Wetland Delineation, Framingham, MA, 9/29/09; Wetland Classification, UNH, 10/21/09; Introduction to Field Indicators of Hydric Soils in the U.S., Version 6.0, UNH; 10/30/09

I always enjoy my classes, and I feel if I learn just one thing I didn't know, then the class was a success. In today's ferns class, I learned a whole lot, so I went a way very happy, although very wet by the end (Huge rain in New England again today.) I'm excited to go home and see if I can ID some of the difficult ones in the yard.

Sometimes I feel that the more I learn, the more that I learn that I don't know nearly as much as I should, or want to. I guess the learning process never ends. It is going to make for a busy few months, though...especially with vacation thrown in to visit Acadia State Park for a week in mid August.