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VOICE–OVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode we talk with a GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development. 

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ABBY TURNER, HOST: I’m Abby Turner and I’m a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at The Graduate Center. I interviewed Cait for this episode and I work in the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. Today Cait Field came into our office to talk about her career at the New York City Parks Department, am I saying that right? Why don’t you tell us what you do first, what your title is?  

CAIT FIELD, GUEST: Sure. My title is the Manager for Science and Research Development at Freshkills Park.  

TURNER: So why don’t you walk us through what a normal day would be like or what the typical activities are going on in a day? 

FIELD: There’s no normal day in my job, which I like. My job in general consists of almost anything at all science related for the Freshkills Park project. The Freshkills Park project is the largest landfill-to-park transformation in the world, so it’s the former Freshkills Landfill on Staten Island. It was in operation from 1948 till 2001, so 53 years, and now since its closure in 2001 it’s slowly being transformed into a space that will be accessible to the public. And along the way in that there’s obviously a lot to look at scientifically as far as what changes. So I manage outside research projects, some of them from CUNY, there’s a few coming from the College of Staten Island. Also from Rutgers or the US Forest Service, etcetera. And I also conduct some of our own internal research projects and then I work on bringing some of that scientific research to the public in various ways and thinking about ways that we can incorporate that back into our development and park management plans.  

TURNER: Wow to me that sounds really exciting, that sounds like a cool job.  

FIELD: Yeah so some days are in the office a lot of days are in the field, it varies seasonally.  

TURNER: Literally in the field? 

FIELD: Yeah they’re big grassy meadows.  

TURNER: So it doesn’t look like a lot of landfill anymore.  

FIELD: No not at all. 

TURNER: They’ve covered it up. So does your job involve a lot of people management? 

FIELD: There’s a little bit of people management. We’re a really small team, right now there’s 7 of us who are full time permanent employees for that project. We’re sort of unique within the New York City Parks Department because we only work for one park which is really atypical. And that’s because it’s an inter-agency project with New York City Parks Department and the Department of Sanitation as well as the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. So because there’s all these different sorts of particularities that aren’t involved in other parks, we kind of have our own small team that’s sort of developed the plans for moving forward to execute this park project. And so there’s not a big staff so it’s not like I manage a ton of people. I definitely you know manage some researchers, some from CUNY.  

Just trying to say you know, “this is how we’re going to do this, this is how this research can take place.” it’s interesting to be on the other side from academics now and sort of wrangling academics. Not that things necessarily move very fast in government, the government and academia are both notoriously kind of like slow-moving. But there is a different mentality outside of academia so it’s funny to kind of now interface and have to explain to people in my office like, “why didn’t you hear back from that person.” “I don’t know probably because I didn’t email them 5 times you know.” So it’s a little bit of people but a lot of it is sort of managing data sets and thinking about what other research can take place. And then trying to think about ways to recruit some of that research and make the changes that are happening there not only more sort of known by the public, but also more known by the scientific community.  

TURNER: Wow great! And so remind us of your program here and what you studied specifically here at the GC? 

FIELD: So I was in the Biopsychology or Behavioral Neuroscience program. I worked in a lab at Hunter College with Dr. Chris Brown. And I studied signaling behavior in weakly electric fishes.  

TURNER: So did you always think that you were going to do government level research? Was that attractive to you or were you looking for a postdoc? Like what was your job search like?  

FIELD: I was not looking for a postdoc. You know even when I came in to graduate school, I know you know the majority of people I would still think when they come into graduate school they’re thinking academia. I didn’t really know exactly where I thought I’d go but I didn’t necessarily think it was going to be traditional academia. So I from pretty early on was thinking more about what I could do that kind of brought a variety of my interests together both before and during and now currently as well. I have a secondary career in the maritime industry as a boat captain. 

TURNER: I did see that on your LinkedIn and I forgot I was going to ask you about that.  

FIELD: So I’ve worked in New York Harbor since 2007. And I actually did that part-time through graduate school, which I was really fortunate to have an adviser that sort of put up with that.  

TURNER: Is that helping pay the bills or is it more of a hobby?  

FIELD: It’s helping pay the bills, it’s a professional job. And I’ve been at that company for 11 years now, Classic Harbor Line is the company. It operates up to 100-ton commercial vessels in the harbor. So that was something I’d done for a long time, I mean I started even you know working in the maritime world as a teenager. So it’s been kind of a separate passion of mine and I for awhile thought about trying to get into some type of research vessel work and I thought that would be a nice sort of merging of my interests. I did work with fish in graduate school, although admittedly they were you know freshwater South American fish so a little different. It’s actually, in some ways, it’s funny because I do some fish work at Freshkills now and I’ve had to teach myself about mid-Atlantic fishes because you know I was not as familiar with those. So I kind of thought something along the lines of combining some sort of academic maybe work in the sense that there might be an education-type component, certainly a research component, but with some other type of waterfront position.  

There aren’t a lot of those types of positions obviously. For example, Middlebury College in Vermont actually has a research vessel that they run on Lake Champlain. But there’s a lot of colleges that have research vessels but we’re talking like SCRIPPS out in California where it’s oceanographic research and not anything that I really studied. And a lot of those positions are you know go out to sea for 6 weeks and then come back or you’re traveling all over the world. And I kind of knew I wanted to have a home base and the longer I was in New York, I grew up on Long Island, the more I kind of wanted to stay in the New York City area too. And that really narrowed it down as far as what kind of jobs.  

TURNER: So how did you find it? Seems like you found a really cool one.  

FIELD: Yeah it is a cool job. So the job was actually sent around by Mark Hauber, who used to be in the Psychology Department at Hunter College and then was at the CUNY Research Foundation. And he had some work that he was conducting at Freshkills Park using bird boxes and examining birds there versus birds at Jamaica Bay and birds at Black Rock Forest in Cornwall, New York. And he sent the posting around and I sort of surprisingly had already been to Freshkills Park on the water. So the boat company I work for had sort of done a scouting project to see if we might run some type of eco-kayak tours to there. So I’d actually been there so it was sort of serendipitous that I had some idea. And because I had only been there via boat, the only time I’ve been there, it had it like fit a little. And I liked what I saw the posting that it was clearly working with a very wide variety of different types of research which is sort of what I had realized I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be in like one specific research program, so I applied. And I was not done yet with the PhD so that did become then a challenge to finish up.  

TURNER: So what was the pattern there like did you get your interview for the job and then realize “I better get this dissertation finished?”  

FIELD: I actually had a year of working in the job before I finished. And that was a really difficult year. 

TURNER: Because of the time commitment?  

FIELD: Yeah I mean I was working a full-time job as well as trying to finish my dissertation. I did manage to delay my start at the job long enough to finish any data collection that I had to do. So I pumped out like the last of my last experiment. 

TURNER: It adds that extra motivation at least?  

FIELD: Yeah I’d put in a really long days in the lab for awhile and got all of the data. But then of course you know there’s still a lot of work to do and so it took me another year after that before defending. 

TURNER: Gotcha. And this particular job…did it call for the PhD or what were the requirements for it?  

FIELD: This job did not call for a PhD. Their requirements were a little bit broad. They did prefer a graduate degree, but I also did have a Master’s degree so I already qualified for the job. I sort of laughed when I read the position because it is such a broad position, like I work on a lot of different projects. So it almost seemed a little bit like they were looking for you know the Director of the Museum of Natural History or something. Just someone who knew like a ton of city connections and just like a really wide base. So actually immediately when I applied, I thought have no shot at this. And a good friend of mine actually from the same program also applied for the position and also was called for an interview. But he had already accepted a faculty position somewhere else. So I was really surprised actually when I got called because I also found out that you know things do move slow in the hiring process with government.  

TURNER: So how long did this process take?  

FIELD: I applied…the deadline for the application was at the end of May. And I got called for an interview at the end of July.  

TURNER: Oh wow, that’s a long time to wait!  

FIELD: I mean I kind of hadn’t heard anything so I thought well… And it was such a, for me it felt like such a shot in the dark to even apply and I wasn’t done yet like I said. And then I got called for the interview and my adviser was actually out of town, I think he was actually abroad. And so I got a call for the interview and the interview was like two days later.  

TURNER: And how did you prep for that?  

FIELD: I had no idea what to do. I mean I read a lot of things about Freshkills Park. You know I read some research papers that had been published that had come out of Freshkills. So I kind of had some idea but it was such a broad position I had no idea really how to apply. And I interviewed I thought well that was a good learning experience you know, it’s good to go on interviews getting to the end of this PhD. And then I thought well you know but I don’t think I’m going to get it.  

TURNER: Had they asked about your progress and your degree?  

FIELD: They did and I did say that I wasn’t done yet. But that wasn’t a big concern for them because like I said they didn’t need someone with a PhD. I mean they were happy to get someone with a PhD.  

TURNER: So were they specifically asking you, I’m guessing about your understanding of like research design?  

FIELD: Yeah, not just research design but also sort of the understanding of how to build a program I guess. Like how would you go about sort of making more connections and getting more research to happen at the park and getting the work that’s happening there more known in the scientific community.  

TURNER: And so, I mean it seems like a great skill that I didn’t realize we should be building. So how did you kind of build that skill while you were in graduate school?  

FIELD: You know part of it was actually working in the maritime world as well. Just because the New York City maritime world is sort of inherently tied to a lot of civic sort of projects and initiatives and you know waterfront redevelopment. So I kind of knew some of that world as well so I was lucky to have those connections to pull from as well. But also just working in CUNY, because you know luckily in CUNY there’s a pretty broad range of research that takes place within the system here. I actually at that point realized I did know a pretty wide variety of researchers. And especially even if you think of psychology, it has so many different programs and you kind of end up interfacing with people from all those different programs. So I just saw it as a position that was really about making the connections and I thought I could maybe do that.  

TURNER: How did you describe that though in the interview?  

FIELD: Yeah, I used an example of… I mean one of the things that was to my advantage and would have been to anyone’s advantage who was interviewing for the position is that I’m sort of the only…this type of scientist in the work I do. So they actually brought someone else into my interview committee that was not from the team I work with, but was still from Parks and worked more in the natural resources, ecology type division, to have you know someone who knew something about this type of work. But it meant coming in as someone who had been in graduate school and had kind of been in the academy for awhile. You sort of know how that world works at that point. So for instance, I gave them an example in my interview of attending sort of regional conferences would be really important because that’s where you’re going to meet the people that are doing the work here you know. Not just… not necessarily going to the Society for Neuroscience, an international conference, not to mention the work I do now is much more ecology-based.  

TURNER: Did you have to find the local scientists and kind of bring them to the park? 

FIELD: Yeah, there also were projects that were already happening so I had those researchers to pull from and get their impressions on what else should happen. And I actually did a Master’s at Hunter separate from the PhD program. I did the Animal Behavior and Conservation Master’s that happens at Hunter. So I also had some sort of connections and experience in the conservation and ecology world in New York City.  

TURNER: Specifically just because, if you’re planning to federal jobs, you go to USAjobs.gov. What do you do if you’re applying to New York City jobs?  

FIELD: There’s NYCjobs. And there’s a different series of jobs that are visible to you depending on whether or not you’re a city employee. This is it I think the same in federal jobs and certainly in state jobs too, there are some positions that are only available for people who are already in.  

TURNER: They want to hire within.  

FIELD: Yeah once you get into a sort of a title, you’re then eligible for jobs that are within that title. But there are a lot of jobs that also get opened to the public depending on if they think it’s a job that could be filled within the agency or within the government. They might try to do it as an internal, but jobs such as mine that were so kind of strange in some ways and not the norm even within the department, they figured they might need to hire somebody from outside.  

TURNER: And so what would you recommend for, well first of all do you recommend New York City jobs for our GC graduates?  

FIELD: Yeah I do recommend New York City jobs. I will say I really liked working in New York City government. For one, it’s sort of a puzzle. And I say that in a positive way, it’s kind of like learning a new system and learning how to function within that system can be really satisfying. And I think it’s the same way as learning how to function in academia can be sort of inherently satisfying. You kind of realize how to be better at that. It’s also, I mean it’s really nice after coming from graduate school to now have a pretty 9 to 5 job.  

TURNER: Ok so it is generally 9 to 5?  

FIELD: Yeah I mean I do some odd work. I mean I was at work at 6:00 AM on Sunday but you know for the most part it’s pretty 9 to 5. Unless it’s field work that has to happen at a particular time, but my day-to-day is pretty 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. 

TURNER: In Manhattan?  

FIELD: Yeah in lower Manhattan. I go to Staten Island a lot but our home base is in lower Manhattan. And it’s kind of a totally different experience from graduate school which is sort of like all the time. So I really like going home after work. And I like being at work, I actually do enjoy my job.  

TURNER: Great! So what would you recommend or what kind of advice would you give to graduates here that might be looking into local government work? Maybe not even in parks, you know, we have like so many different departments.  

FIELD: Yeah and Department of Transportation does hire people especially in psychology too. The US Forest Service actually hires a lot of psychologists including social psychologists.  

TURNER: So what should we be doing now in graduate school, what kinds of thing should students be looking at?  

FIELD: Yeah I think it’s I think it’s important to start thinking about how your work, even if you don’t immediately think it is, that you know everyone has the answer. Like “what is your work for” and “why is this important.” And we all come up with these good sort of like very science-minded “why this is important to the research” answers. Which are true, but there’s other reasons that the work you do is important and there’s other skills that you’re gaining by doing that work. And I think a big part of it isn’t so much what intentional skills you can gain as a graduate student but more recognizing how the skills that you’re getting as a graduate student can be transferred into other types of work. You’re probably really good at managing projects if you’ve been conducting dissertation projects for example and that’s a huge part of working in government is being able to manage projects and work on a timeline and look at your minimal resources, which we’re all used to as well in graduate school.  

And then it’s also just kind of starting to get a little bit more familiar with the type of work that’s out there, that’s happening in city government. I think a lot of people don’t at first at all think about the fact that there’s probably a lot of science jobs in New York City government. You’re like, “well isn’t it just you know the people who work for sanitation and the people who work for the MTA and there’s state government. But you know we don’t think about the fact that there’s also social psychologists who works for the Department of Health, there’s people who work in Parks in conservation, who work in Education. There’s also a lot of people who develop curriculum for example within the city. So I think it’s just starting to look out there at what exists in the city and being aware of those types of positions. I think that’s a big part of it.  

TURNER: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of positions that we’re just not even aware that exist like yours. And it makes total sense that someone would need to coordinate all of the research going on at this park and of course as a graduate student coming out of here, we have those research skills and how to interpret and plan the research for that. But I just, I hadn’t even thought about it until I saw your job title and then said, “yeah I guess that does make sense.” 

FIELD: Yeah and my job, you know there’s only one of my job but there’s other ones like it that come up.  

TURNER: Sure, sure. Is there anything you wish you would have done more of while you were at The Graduate Center to help your career prospects? 

FIELD: I think I probably would have taken more advantage of some of the sort of career services type things that are offered by The Graduate Center. And I say that in total sincerity you know I think you get a little stuck in your kind of research bubble and it’s hard to like see what comes after and it’s hard to like think that it could be there. But I know that there’s professional development that happens here and that’s probably something I wish I would have done. I think it would’ve made it easier actually to transition into the sort of you know regular non-academia workforce.  

TURNER: And how was your transition?  

FIELD: It wasn’t bad. Yeah I had a hard time at first because I was still going to bed really late and having to get up. So I sort of realized like oh this is so obvious, I need to start going to bed earlier. But I mean I do a lot of professional development now through the city which is really nice.  

TURNER: What do those things look like?  

FIELD: I’ve taken project management courses, sometimes it’s like a software course in Adobe right. Like there are ways to make yourself better at your job right and potentially better at other jobs that you might be interested. But I know that you know some of that’s offered at The Graduate Center as well so. Not necessarily the exact same things but I think it also would have been nice to be more prepared for this sort of interview process and how that was all going to go.  

TURNER: Okay so you had two days to prepare for your interview.  

FIELD: I did. 

TURNER: And was it just one? And then they told you that you had the job after that? 

FIELD: Just one interview. Well when they called me and asked me for recommendations. Again I got called for the interview, it was like two days later. My advisor was out of town and then I interviewed and I thought well that went well but I have no chance. And you know and then I got called for references which is when I had to have a serious talk with my advisor…like “I applied for a job, I already interviewed, I kind of need you to be a reference so I hope you’re okay with that right. But he was really supportive.  

TURNER: That’s good to hear. We’ve heard kind of different stories about departments, different degrees of supporting their students taking on non-academic jobs. And it might just be because they aren’t expecting their students to be looking for these jobs. But hopefully our office is facilitating that conversation.  

FIELD: I hope so because I mean most of us do end up in non-academic jobs right. And I was a little lucky, I mean the job I applied for literally the head of our department had sent over. And I had kind of always been sort of in a conversation with my advisor about not necessarily wanting to be in academia.  

TURNER: So your advisor was alright with that? 

FIELD: My adviser was open to that. Probably adviser by adviser would be my guess but I don’t really know.  

TURNER: And so did you find academic references were okay for a non-academic job? 

FIELD: I was very fortunate, I needed 3 references and one of them was of course my PhD advisor, that made sense obviously. 

TURNER: Was that also your lab like supervisor, is that how that worked?  

FIELD: We were a really small lab, so at the time I was the only PhD student in the lab. So you know we had a close relationship. But there were undergrads and so on too. But I was lucky I had done a fellowship when I was at The Graduate Center where I worked in a New York City high school. So I was able to use the teacher who I worked with there who obviously was able to speak about my ability to talk about science right to a non-academic audience. So she was a great reference and then because I had also worked in the maritime world for years at that point I had a sort of a more stereotypical boss who was able to be a reference. So I think it was important. I don’t know if that would have been like a make-or-break thing for getting the job but I definitely felt like it helped you know the people who were hiring me to be able to talk to these people that had like worked with me as opposed to been in the lab with me and supervised me, you know it’s a little different.  

TURNER: Sure and so you brought up a skill that we also try to do workshops on and really emphasize here as well, talking about your research to non-academic audiences. So this sounds like it’s really important at your job as well, can you speak about that a little bit.  

FIELD: Yeah I mean it is really important at my job now even just for you know speaking to the press. Because of the project that I work on in particular is one that people have a lot of misconceptions about or fears about or skepticism. Because we’re you know turning a landfill into a park. And you know people at first really well I would never want to go there right but people go there and they realize it’s beautiful. And there’s a lot of engineering that’s involved in doing it that’s done by the Department Sanitation not by the Parks Department. But we have to talk about all that. And being able to talk about things that are really complex, and I mean I’m not a landfill engineer by any means right, but I’m still able to understand the concepts because of my work in graduate school and research and be able to translate those. We do a lot of interviews so people definitely want to know about the research that’s happening there as well as just the changes in biodiversity and how the ecosystem is changing there. And I end up speaking about that a lot and speaking about that you know not to an academic journal, I’m speaking about that to The New York Times or CityLab, which is part of the Atlantic, or places like that. So it’s a different skill.  

TURNER: And how do you practice this skill?  

FIELD: You know we give a lot of tours so that helps. So you just have a lot of opportunities. 

TURNER: Who are you giving tours to?  

FIELD: We give tours to…some of it is school groups which I don’t do a lot of the school group tours, but different… it’s such a variety but we just had you know for instance statisticians from China who work basically kind of like in almost like the budget office actually. So there’s just different municipal groups mostly from different cities and countries so we’re able to talk about the project with them and sometimes it’s a group of landfill engineers right. And then I’m not the one who talks to them because they want to know about landfill engineering. But sometimes it’s just a group that does want to know about the general changes there. I also talk a lot actually to college classes. So we host a lot of college classes urban ecology for example, who come and talk about it to them.  

TURNER: So you’re still doing… did you do a GTF here, were you teaching a teaching fellow here?  

FIELD: I was yeah. 

TURNER: Ok so you’re still doing a little bit of that almost.  

FIELD: I still do a little bit of teaching and a little bit of mentoring. We have a couple Master’s projects on site which… I’m not their adviser but I am sort of like a committee member. So it’s nice too because I get to kind of stay in academia a little bit but not having a strictly academic job. I think every once in awhile about adjuncting something for a semester just to stay in there but it’s hard to have the motivation to go do it somewhere.  

TURNER: Okay, something else I think is interesting is that you have your PhD in your position, and you’re kind of coordinating other researchers. Do you think it’s important that you have your PhD when like talking about research with other researchers that also have their PhD? Is it something that comes into play?  

FIELD: It definitely comes into play and I can even say that because I didn’t have my PhD right when I started. So I had that first year…it can be a little bit of a difficult comparison because I also didn’t know what I was doing that first year you know. You’re figuring out what you should do obviously. But yeah it definitely helps to sort of have that you know. At that point it is just a title but it’s a title that means something, it means that you’re coming from a background of research and a common understanding about how research works and you know how to think about science. So I actually work with a lot of other PhD’s in my job both within the Parks Department but also just with all the other researchers that I work with. So it’s just the like knowledge that there’s a common language and understanding.  

TURNER: Gotcha. And do they ever ask you about your own research?  

FIELD: It comes up but you know I think my own research is in some ways a little far removed from the New York City Parks Department. So it comes up but more as a you know point of interest. And a lot of them did totally different things before too, but you know we mostly end up talking about the research at Freshkills.  

TURNER: So this credential gives you that like you said, common language to talk to other researchers. And so that helps rather than if you were just an admin who is just managing.  

FIELD: Yeah I don’t think they would trust me as much or in some ways rightfully right You know science is so misinterpreted so frequently. So it’s nice to know that we’re on the same page.  

TURNER: Great okay, that’s good to know. Can you think of anything else you want to mention about your job that might be really relevant to a graduate student here?  

FIELD: You know I think the big thing is more…I kind of mentioned it already but just recognizing that you have skills that are much more widely applicable than you think they are. And just because you see a post saying this is for something that’s kind of related to the type of work you did but not really the type of research you did, but isn’t necessarily a posting that’s looking for specifically someone to start a research program in that type of research but more to work within that program. You’re actually probably pretty qualified and I think we tend to sell ourselves short too much getting out of graduate school thinking that like all we’ve done is prepare ourselves for this one field and it’s just so not true. And you know for me now, I’ve been there for a little over 3 years, working in a field that really isn’t what I was doing beforehand, I’m able to see now that like, “okay there’s other possibilities too in my future for things I can work in.” I have the framework of skills from the research I did and now from this job that I’ve been working in to apply those to something that’s totally different.  

TURNER: So you would encourage graduate students to go for it?  

FIELD: Yeah I mean I think if it sounds interesting to you… obviously don’t just like give up on everything you like but if it sounds like it could be interesting to you, don’t assume that you’re not qualified.  

TURNER: You may be surprised how qualified you are. I think there’s definitely some echo with advice nice we’ve gotten from other graduates. That you have these transferable skills and you need to start recognizing it.  

FIELD: Yeah and there’s definitely like a little bit of growing pains starting in you know a more regular job but I would say that in the end… obviously it has its ups and downs just like graduate school, but in the end I think it’s a little less stressful.  

TURNER: Well that’s great to hear! Okay well if that’s it we can conclude our interview. I really want to thank you for coming uptown a little bit to meet with us and to do this interview, we really appreciate it.  

FIELD: Thanks so much for having me!  

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HOST, VOICE-OVER: Thank you to Cait who came to the office today to share her experience with New York City Parks on Alumni Aloud. If you want to hear about your possibilities after The Graduate Center, you should come to one of our events this semester and follow us on Twitter @CareerPlanGC for details and updates. We hope to see you soon! Thanks for listening. 

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