UT students to get experience working for national parks

Students at the University of Tennessee who want to work in national parks will get to give it a try in coming semesters.

The expanded collaboration gives the students hands-on work through internships, research and volunteering. They will help with research and interacting with visitors at the three smaller national properties managed by the National Park Service in East Tennessee: Obed Wild and Scenic River, Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, and Manhattan Project National Historical Park. 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is not part of the collaboration. 

The experiences will be part of the Outdoor Recreation Park Management concentration which is housed at the UT School of Natural Resources under the Forestry major. 

Associate Professor Ryan Sharp,  and Niki Nicholas, park superintendent for Obed and Big South Fork, announced the collaboration on April 8 in the Historic Rugby community.

The Outdoor Recreation Park Management concentration is not just for learning to be a National Park Service ranger but for learning skills relevant to many careers at conservation or recreational areas, including rafting companies, national forests and nonprofits, said Sharp. 

Nicholas said the program is about creating the next generation of park managers, forest managers and outdoor recreation stewards generally, adding the NPS could recruit students from the program to fill jobs. Sharp said many students would like to work for a national park or in conjunction with one as a researcher but weren’t aware that the opportunities existed.

“That may not be because students are uninterested,” he said. “They just don’t know.”

“We’ve always worked together but this is a chance for us to really put this into overdrive,” Nicholas said of the NPS collaboration with UT. “We always want young people to flourish.”

She said she wanted to make sure people going through the program had experience with and could understand park work. 

Both she and Sharp stressed that working for NPS often involves working with people and having people skills. The collaboration will give students experience volunteering at visitor centers and leading activities like rock climbing and paddling for the visitors. Volunteers will also work at events like Big South Fork’s Spring Planting Festival and Storytelling Festival. Nicholas said the parks need the students’ help at events that include children.

“We have a lot of kids around,” she said. “We need to have a lot of adults around.”

She also said students will help with park research needs, which both she and Sharp did earlier in their careers, with Nicholas writing a master’s thesis on a subject the Great Smoky Mountains National Park superintendent had requested. Sharp said his first research project and first publications involved looking at human interactions with black bears at Big South Fork.

Sharp said students might take only Outdoor Recreation and Park Management classes during junior year, allowing them to go out to the parks for more extended time.

“The best thing about doing this work is that you can physically see the students’ lightbulbs go off,” he said. “It’s harder to see in the classroom. It happens. But you can see it so clearly when they’re out in the field.

“This kind of major is attractive to kids who want to get out and do things,” he said, adding that type of learner included himself. “I can’t learn when I’m sitting in the classroom staring at a power point.”