February 19, 2010
I was the first person in my family – and to date the only person in my family – to get an environmental sciences degree. It was not a move without controversy. My parents are pretty progressive people – far from Republicans – but even so they have some conventional ideas of what they want their kids to do. I could have been a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, an accountant, or any other high-paying profession. Having an environmental science degree – at least in their opinion – was not a good use of my time in college. They figured that people with environmental science degrees spent their life broke, drifting from one low-paying job to the other.