I sit in my new apartment in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, reflecting on my first day of orientation at the University of Northern British Columbia campus, Department of Natural Resource and Environmental Studies. The campus is beautiful and modern, its architecture symbolic of historical settler and indigenous themes. Each room is connected with a labyrinth of indoor tunnels so busy students can dash between classes without bundling up for the frigid winter weather outside most of the academic year. But today, the sun aluminating the thick haze of wildfire smoke made for a dramatic dystopian backdrop to the campus tour.
It’s been 5 years since I was last a full-time student, and a thing or two has happened since my last stint in University. But a clear mission drove me to the decision to return to the great halls of academia: applied conservation research. My team and I have spent the last 5 years collecting an extensive dataset on the critically endangered Vancouver Island marmot. After passing several major milestones last year, both personal professional milestones such as my RPBio designation, and species recovery milestones such as the highest population of VI marmots ever recorded in 2024, it became clear the next step for me was not in the mountains, but in the lab. It has been long overdue for someone to take a deep dive into the dataset to see what it has to tell us. With two postdocs starting in the lab at the same time as me, investigating other aspects of marmot ecology and recovery, there was no better moment for me to make the step. With the support of my employer and faculty advisor, i reduced my workplace commitments during the academic calendar, while retaining my role during the summer field season, and packed up my life on Vancouver Island to trade in my mountaineering boots and telemetry antennas for R scripts and modelling simulations.
And I couldn’t be more excited to dive headfirst into the season ahead.
Kevin Gourlay 