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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 a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at The Graduate Center. I work in the Office of Career Planning & Professional Development and I interviewed Julie, who earned her PhD in Criminal Justice from The Graduate Center. She is now a Wildlife Crime Research Officer at the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Vienna, Austria. So today I have Julie Viollaz on the phone with me and she’s going to be telling us about her job in the UN, she can tell us the specific office. And she graduated from The Graduate Center with her PhD in Criminal Justice. So hi Julie! Thanks for joining us today. We would love to hear all about the interesting things that you do at your job. Your job is very different, I imagine it’s really different even from other criminal justice graduates. So why don’t you first kind of introduce where you are and what your position is?  

JULIE VIOLLAZ, GUEST: Sure, no problem. So I am based out of Austria in Vienna and I work as the Wildlife Crime Research Officer for the Crime Research Section of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. So I’m responsible for UNODC’s portfolio of any research that relates to wildlife poaching, wildlife trafficking. And my role is to do research that helps our operations team that works to fight wildlife crime in different countries all around the world.  

TURNER: Wow okay. So give me a little bit of your educational background, it looks like your undergrad was in biology?  

VIOLLAZ: Yes so I have an undergraduate degree in actually biology and then a self-designed major in forensic science. I also happened to do a minor in music in clarinet performance. But then I moved on directly to actually a PhD in Criminal Justice. And I focused my dissertation on looking at human-leopard conflict and how to apply crime prevention principles to stop the illegal killing of leopards.  

TURNER: And where did your dissertation research take place?  

VIOLLAZ: So the bulk of the field work was actually done in South Africa. I went there for a conference to present on art theft which I was studying at the time and I wanted to do some volunteer work on the back end and ended up calling up a game farm out there that was looking for volunteers. And my dissertation supervisor suggested I think about dissertation topics while I was there and it just happened that they were having problems with leopard poaching. Although they don’t call it poaching in that region. And I ended up going and interviewing a bunch of people that had killed leopards in the area as part of just something that was fun but also as an initial idea towards my dissertation and it became a full-fledged dissertation eventually.  

TURNER: Oh wow that is really interesting. So you started with art?  

VIOLLAZ: I started with a lot of things. I mean I was originally going to be a terrorism scholar. I was looking at women’s radicalization into terrorist groups. And I was not a US citizen and still I’m not. And so what I realized was that in terms of jobs, that kind of work coming from the United States was probably going to be difficult for me to continue. And my dissertation supervisor left in the middle of what was my first few years of my PhD so I ended up switching to a different advisor who encouraged me to go looking a little further afield in terms of topics. And so I ended up at the time… I was doing some research on art theft and I went to South Africa to present on that.  

And because I was looking for some kind of fun stuff to do on the side I ended up wanting to volunteer with a game farms that happened to have some issues with leopard killings. And ended up kind of spending time interviewing a lot of farmers in the area that talked to me about this issue and realized that I could actually turn it into a dissertation without meaning to. So it gave me the perfect opportunity to basically do field work as kind of a more…I wouldn’t say casually necessarily, but kind of as an opportunistic occurrence and I could build trust easily because I was out there for different reasons. And I gathered a lot of interview data that I ended up turning into a dissertation.  

TURNER: That’s really awesome. How many languages do you speak?  

VIOLLAZ: Technically two fluently, French and English. But I’ve also learned Spanish and German. I’m not as fluent in those but I’ve got enough to get around.  

TURNER: Okay cool. Why don’t you tell us kind of your path from graduate school…as far as like the different jobs, maybe fellowships, places you’ve stopped along the way before you got your position here.  

VIOLLAZ: Sure. I guess I would almost start in my undergrad rather than grad school because I think this kind of path was unintentionally started very long ago. During my third year in undergrad I wanted to study abroad and I found a flyer for going to Kenya to study human-wildlife conflict. So I went out to Kenya and spend a semester there in the field right next to a major national park. And spent a lot of time doing community interviews about human-wildlife conflict issues and part of that is killings of wildlife which is a form of poaching if you define it very strictly. And so that’s where I started in terms of learning about the topic. And then as I said I went and did some terrorism work for grad school and went into criminology/criminal justice. And so I went into terrorism because it was a subject I was interested in, mostly the women’s aspect of it. I ended up having to switch advisors and got into this whole wildlife crime field.  

And when I was finishing my degree I was trying to figure out where I was going to go because I still had a very strong background in just general criminology so I could have done something that was not conservation or wildlife related. But I really had a passion to go back into the field and do some anti-poaching work. So actually the first job that I got was working for Interpol as an intern at the United Nations in New York, looking at environmental crime issues and that was mostly on the policy side. And then after that I actually got a call from a contact that I’d made several years before when I was presenting my PhD research at a conference in DC for a conservation practitioners. He called me up and he had a need for somebody to evaluate the anti-poaching component of the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment that USAID runs in central Africa. And he had gotten my name from knowing me at that conference and from a few other contacts. And he invited me to take part in the evaluation of this CARPE program as their wildlife crime advisor essentially.  

So I left about a month later for a 2-month mission to the DRC and the Republic of Congo and spent 6 weeks out in the field evaluating all these kinds of anti-poaching projects and wildlife prosecution initiatives. And from there I kept working with that company that was a subcontractor to the US government and did some analysis on all this evaluation of this project. I then went on to Vietnam, that was the next kind of full-time job that I had where I was hired by Michigan State University and working with a partnership of NGOs World Wildlife Fund, Global Wildlife Conservation and Fauna and Flora International. And they were looking to build a community crime prevention project to stop illegal snaring in several national parks in the central Vietnam region.  

TURNER: What’s snaring?  

VIOLLAZ: Snaring is using kind of a wire trap to catch animals. So you put down these traps and they essentially catch whatever walks through it. So they were looking to find a way to get the communities that are partly responsible for the behavior but also that you know are good people on the ground to help deal with the snaring problem. They wanted to build a program where those community members would be responsible for stopping hunters from going out and laying snares. So I went in to do kind of pilot research on that to see if it was even feasible and how you would set up that sort of program. And from there I was living in Vietnam for about 7 months. And I had been applying to the United Nations for quite a bit. It was one of the first kind of applications that I did on a regular basis when I was looking for jobs.  

And this job came up that was Wildlife Crime Research Officer and I applied. And you know I wasn’t quite expecting to get it I think, mostly because I had my sights set on staying in Vietnam actually implementing this project I had designed. And it turns out that after nine months of recruitment, they offered me the job. So I was quite happy to make a move and come back out here and kind of lead the research efforts on wildlife crime for UNODC, with a lot of potential for kind of building a bigger program. Because they’re trying, at least the goal for me, is to kind of really get a lot more research done on various topics. Right now we do global trafficking trends for wildlife, but we’re trying to get much bigger than that. So yeah I mean that’s kind of the circuitous path that I took to get out here.  

TURNER: That’s awesome! Did you say it took 9 months from the time you applied to actually getting it?  

VIOLLAZ: Yeah I mean something in that nature. The UN recruitment processes are quite long. I believe I had some recruitment processes for the UN that lasted over 2 years before they pulled the plug on them.  

TURNER: Wow, so it’s pretty typical for the UN jobs to take that long.  

VIOLLAZ: Yeah it’s a huge hugely long recruitment process.  

TURNER: Gotcha. Okay so let’s go back to how you were looking for these UN jobs. You knew you wanted to be at the UN?  

VIOLLAZ: It wasn’t so much that I knew I wanted to be at the UN as much as there’s not too many jobs in conservation that have the breadth in terms of worldwide coverage. There’s also the access to resources and kind of the influence that the UN has. I think for me what I was looking for every time I was working was a job that would allow me to do a lot of fieldwork and work on the ground, but also a job that allowed me to do research that I could then turn into projects that need to be implemented on the ground. So I was very interested in going into the NGO world, the issue being that you know NGO personnel that work on conservation tend to have more of a kind of biology conservation background which I didn’t have. And so for me it was easier to kind of go through the kind of traditional criminology structures to then work on conservation issues.  

And I mean even when I was working in Vietnam I was hired specifically because I was a criminologist and they were interested in finding a crime prevention solution. But it’s not that common of a profile or job in conservation to be a criminologist. So when I looked at these jobs it was like, oh there’s a job you know working for Wildlife Conservation Society that requires somebody who is actually knowledgeable in law enforcement and crime. Okay, this is a job that I can apply to. So it was really just finding kind of that key job that actually required my skill set or better valued my skill set as opposed to applying to all sorts of organizations. Because a lot of times they just didn’t have the profile in the jobs that they were putting out that I could fit.  

TURNER: I see. That’s awesome that you found the exact kind of fit that you needed. So why don’t you kind of walk us through the day-to-day. What is the day-to-day like at your job? I imagine it’s very different day-to-day but why don’t you go through what you do.  

VIOLLAZ: Sure I mean I’ll give you a couple ideas of what day-to-day looks like in a few of the jobs that I’ve done because I think it captures a big breadth of what somebody that has my skill set or is interested in this field could do. So I mean my day-to-day here at the UN is much more project management based. So I’m responsible for a team of consultants that goes out into the field in various countries that we’re interested in gathering research information. So for example I had a consultant out in Vietnam looking at illegal tiger farming. I also have a consultant that is working on illegal reptile trade and so is visiting a lot of reptile fairs all over the world and trying to figure out you know what animals are illegally being traded, what collectors are looking for. So I spend a lot of time working with those consultants, designing exactly the type of research that they need to do to get the data that I want. That involves anything from basically going out and interviewing you know government personnel to actually going out and identifying species that are being illegally traded at different locations. And the goal is always to essentially be able to show the major trends that are happening in terms of wildlife trafficking.  

So yeah my day-to-day is mostly managing that. For the UN I also am running a project at the moment in collaboration with my operations colleagues looking at women’s involvement in wildlife crime but also as solution makers. So we’re trying to understand how gender dynamics shape the way that you would come up with strong and effective solutions to wildlife crime because right now a lot of the solutions that we see are very enforcement-heavy. So it’s all about ranger teams and you know how do you prevent offenders from being able to traffic across borders, which is usually customs. So a lot of heavy male-dominated fields. So I’m trying to bring in kind of the women that are involved in some of this enforcement to kind of understand what their role is in all this and why what they’re doing is working.  

So to give you an example, I worked in the Republic of Congo and met a few women that were part of a mixed ranger team that were preventing mostly bushmeat hunting in some of these communities in Congo. And they were telling me that their male counterparts would send them to communities where they had tensions with rangers to kind of de-escalate the conflict and kind of smooth over relationships in the village so that the male rangers could go in and either arrest somebody who had committed a poaching crime or to be able to go and talk to the villagers to get information about some poaching that was happening in the region for example. So I’m running a project to look at how these gender dynamics play a role in finding good solutions. So yeah, those are kind of the things I do. I was going to say the other thing that I do also in different jobs is helping conservation organizations understand how to do proper crime preventions. Now they’re seeing this as a bigger and bigger problem and they’re coming up with different ways to kind of tackle the problem. And a lot of them have to do with law enforcement, have to do with arrests, prosecutions. But it’s not something that a lot of conservationists who have a background in biology know about.  

So I work with conservation organizations to understand okay well, what’s the most effective way to prevent a crime? How do you understand the psychology of offenders so that you can design good solutions to poaching that actually will stop somebody from killing an animal? What are the pitfalls you need to watch out for? So I do all sorts of work like that. And a lot of my work is both sitting in an office and also just going out into the field and interviewing you know people that work on these issues or community members that are affected by it or even poachers at times. So yeah depending on the project that I’m working on I could be doing a lot of things. 

TURNER: Wow yeah. And so is one of your jobs to kind of compile these reports from your various consultants? 

VIOLLAZ: Yeah so we publish at UNODC, every 2 years usually, the World Wildlife Crime Report, which looks at the major trends in wildlife trafficking, so I do that. I’ve also in the past kind of compiled evaluation reports for different projects that do anti-poaching work. I’ve also you know compiled technical reports looking at how you build crime prevention projects for poaching. So yeah all sorts of reports. I also do some advocacy and kind of policy work when I work at the UN, when I go and talk with different member states. Usually to get funding but also just to discuss their strategies for wildlife crime and in which directions they could go. To give you an example, I was working with the French embassy in Vienna a few weeks ago, talking with the ambassador about you know where he should focus his efforts as a policymaker to stop wildlife crime from happening.  

So he wanted to build more coalitions among different agencies at the UN and he also wanted maybe to come up with a kind of global wildlife crime convention. And I was arguing with him to do something slightly different, to focus on…you know we have all these different kinds of solutions to wildlife crime and how do you build a solution that starts from the point where somebody is killing an animal on the ground to the end of the prosecution where you’ve caught somebody that’s been trafficking wildlife across borders and making millions of dollars and you’re trying to prosecute them and put them in jail. So how do you find a solution that works through that entire chain of events and build kind of a holistic approach to stopping wildlife crime. So I mean it’s all sorts of different kinds of scenarios every day. 

TURNER: Interesting. Okay so talk with me a little bit about… so this is a skill that we’re always trying to work on as PhD students and as academics…how did you practice talking about your research to other people outside of academia?  

VIOLLAZ: I mean I guess to be honest, I’m very focused on the results of things. So when I work for example with governments, I try to give them examples of the concepts that I found. So I tell them for example with this gender and wildlife crime project that we’re working on, I was telling colleagues that when you have hunters hunting bushmeat, one of the key elements of that bushmeat eating process that people engage in later on is that you have women that have to cook the meat. And so one of the goals of this project is to say well I know that women for example are always engaged in cooking any bushmeat that people snare, their husbands snare generally. I know that I want to build a project that uses women’s skill sets to prevent wildlife crime. Well here’s one role in which women are active, if I told them that they shouldn’t cook the bushmeat because of various health reasons, etcetera, and they stopped doing so I would stop wildlife crime potentially for that family at least. Because that woman would not cook the bushmeat and the guy wouldn’t go out and hunt it if he knew he couldn’t actually get the meat cooked for consumption. So I don’t know I kind of tend to talk more about specific examples with the people that I work with that aren’t in academia.  

TURNER: So were you technically an international student when you attended the GC? 

VIOLLAZ: Yeah I was, although I’d been living in the United States quite regularly so it wasn’t that foreign to me.  

TURNER: Well I was wondering about how you figured out your like work situation while you were in graduate school?  

VIOLLAZ: Meaning how did I know where to go and what my options were?  

TURNER: Yeah, this is something that comes up a lot for international students. They want to know what companies will sponsor them, although I know that’s hard to say, or just kind of where they should go to look or what paths might work for them.  

VIOLLAZ: I mean I guess I was always open to the idea that I would have to go abroad somewhere to basically build my career, knowing that there were always so many risks with employment in the United States. I think one of the things that I did without meaning to was I ended up working on a subject that was fairly cutting-edge at the time that I graduated. Because at that point the Obama administration had come out with kind of a goal of fighting wildlife crime as part of one of the major White House initiatives. And wildlife crime and poaching had become more and more of an issue in the headlines, in newspapers, etcetera, and it was very linked to development work that the US government and a lot of other governments engage with on a regular day-to-day basis. So I think without necessarily meaning to, I kind of positioned myself in a field that was going to be cutting-edge, that was going to have opportunities opening up that would mean that I would be valuable to a lot of companies regardless of my nationality. I think I also just never really assumed that I would end up working in the United States.  

I wanted to but I knew that it would be complicated. I got a lot of experience working with different organizations in the United States as a volunteer which was not a problem in terms of immigration status. And yeah I mean even now it’s a complicated question because I think even if I were to try to get a US job at this point it would still remain complicated despite quite a number of accomplishments in a fairly strong career. So I think as an international student I guess I was very focused on kind of following my passion while being aware of what skill sets and what subject areas were kind of on the forefront in the US’s mind and in companies that would be working in the US. I also did really spend a lot of time doing a lot of work that wasn’t necessarily all based in the US. I mean every summer I often, when I was an undergraduate student but even as a graduate student, I was involved back in my home country with various projects.  

TURNER: I don’t think you told us where your home country is? 

VIOLLAZ: Yes, so I’m originally from France so I regularly returned to France over the summer. I mean I think it’s tough as an international student to basically be able to predict the market and where you’re going to find opportunities. I think what I saw with my colleagues was that if they were really aiming their career at something that was US-based…like a lot of colleagues that I had wanted to go into finance because they knew that the financial sector would really sponsor visas. It didn’t necessarily work out for them. I think for me I just tended to focus more on building as international a profile as possible, hoping that at one point or another, I would have sufficient interest from a company to really invest in hiring me in the US if I wanted to. And I also to be fair spent a lot of time talking with immigration attorneys to see what I could and couldn’t do.  

TURNER: Yeah so you were really taking care of it and thinking ahead, that’s great.  

VIOLLAZ: Yeah thinking ahead but also just not limiting myself. I think if you focus too much on that, you end up pigeon-holing yourself in ways that are probably unhelpful. I think if I had focused only on looking to pick the choices that would make me a good candidate for a US job, I don’t think I would have ended up with such a rounded profile and kind of international appeal. And it’s the international appeal that I think helped me more than necessarily having targeted myself for the US job market.  

TURNER: Yeah definitely. Let’s go back to your volunteer work, because I feel like that is a really good way that you can still get exposure to jobs or to like work environment or to get job skills without actually taking on an official job. So tell us a little bit about one that was valuable for you.  

VIOLLAZ: I guess I can think of two. One is that I worked as an intern for the New York City Department of Investigation which is kind of the Internal Affairs Bureau I would say, for city employees. This was just an internship that I did during my PhD. I was looking for kind of practical work experience. And I did this throughout my PhD, where I was always working either on a practical research project that was unrelated to my PhD or I was doing some sort of job as an intern somewhere in mostly agencies that interested me or even just on subject matter that interested me. So I worked as an intern for an attorney that was working at DOI and I spent about six months working there off and on. Just essentially doing research and investigative research on cases that they were working of different city employees that had committed different types of crimes or infractions.  

So that was one thing I did, I mean it really wasn’t related to my dissertation in anyway because obviously it wasn’t wildlife crime related, it wasn’t even terrorism related even though most of my research was focused on that. It was mostly just a way to kind of get an in and practical experience in something that was related to my field. Investigations obviously is a big part of criminal justice. While I was doing all of this, I did something for fun, although fun is maybe the wrong word to use. I worked as a domestic violence and rape victim advocate in New York City emergency rooms. I was looking for a volunteer opportunity, wasn’t necessarily looking for something to build you know my skill set per se but I had an interest in just volunteering because I enjoyed that. And I ended up being trained as a rape crisis counselor and going in about a couple times a month to work with survivors in emergency rooms.  

And I have to say that in terms of ability to react to crisis, to manage people’s emotions, to be able to work in a high stress environment, and also to kind of take a step back from everything and being able to view a situation which kind of rationality…those were skills that I learned doing that volunteer opportunity that had nothing to do [my research]. When I did it, I didn’t realize that I was building skills I would use for my job. I just did it because I enjoyed the work and because I knew that you know I had an interest in gender issues. I knew that I liked working in fast paced environments and that this was something that would challenge me. And I use those skills from that internship or volunteer opportunity probably more than any other skills that I built during an internship that I purposely chose to build my career.  

TURNER: And could you tell us what organization would you go through for that if somebody else wanted to do something like?  

VIOLLAZ: The organization that I’d worked with was called the Crime Victims Treatment Center which is based out of New York City. To be fair the way that I learned about all these things, these sorts of opportunities, was usually through asking a faculty member if they had any kind of jobs, opportunity, ideas or organizations that they worked with. I mean for South Africa when I went to work on this game farm, I literally did an internet search for volunteer opportunities with wildlife abroad and just started contacting organizations and saying I’m interested in doing this, do you have any open positions. So a lot of it was through personal contacts and kind of also just chance because I just tried and something clicked. So I guess the thing that drove me was an interest in something and wanting to understand something better.  

And once I got going and found something that I liked, it was the charisma and kind of the effort that I brought in to doing the job that really kind of propelled me forward and helped me with my career later on. Like I still use a lot of the contacts in these organizations on a probably weekly basis to get advice from a professional standpoint or even to make contacts with other people in that network. So yeah, I always went with what I enjoyed without thinking in the back of my mind, “okay what skills am I building, you know is this helpful to me overall?” I didn’t always think, “is this helpful to my career,” and I didn’t always go in with that as my first kind of thing that I focused on. Like it was more led by passion and than the people that I met.  

TURNER: Yeah, it sounds amazing! I love how you’re able to just… you know what I’m going to try this, we’re going to go for this, and you go for it. So usually we end with some advice that you have, maybe words of encouragement for current students at The Graduate Center, whether they’re finishing a Master’s or PhD. Do you have any advice or maybe something that that you wish you had been told earlier? 

VIOLLAZ: I think a couple things. I think one is to plan ahead but don’t try to plan too much ahead. Make sure that you’re taking opportunities that you have an interest in, that are valuable, but you don’t necessarily need to connect all the dots right away. I couldn’t have told you when I started working for the Department of Investigations that I would use then investigative skills I learned to do interviews in the field to understand hunter behavior in Vietnam. There’s no way for me to have predicted that, but I know that it has helped me. So I would say you know always keep in mind what your end goal is in terms of career but don’t disregard an opportunity because it doesn’t exactly fit into what you think is the trajectory to get there. Because I think a lot of times the way that you think about how you should be getting someplace is not the way you’re going to get there.  

I guess the other thing I would say is never underestimate the importance of building connections with people. And I’m not saying networking just for the sake of networking, I’m saying you meet an interesting person at a conference, whether it be for personal reasons that you find them interesting or professional reasons, and you keep in touch. You never know how that person is going to be useful to you five years down the line without even meaning to be useful to you. You constantly come back in contact with people that you’ve seen before because that’s the way the world works. And just to have built that connection over anything is really valuable and means that they’ll remember your name and they’ll tell somebody else about you and all of a sudden you’ve got a much wider network than you ever thought you had.  

I mean I can say that a lot of the jobs that I’ve not necessarily gotten but that I’ve eventually broken into, they’ve been because somebody remembered my name from something random. And so you know for example when I worked in Congo, I was given the job of Wildlife Crime Technical Adviser because a joint colleague who had worked on the same subject at a different university passed my name on to one of his contacts who then passed my name on to another contact and that’s how the person that end up hired me called me. But that other PhD student was just somebody I was friends with. I didn’t you know continue that relationship to advance my career, it was just someone I had an affinity with.  

So I think you know just kind of seeing people as humans and humans that are interesting to you and continuing those relationships with those reasons. Then that builds a genuine network that eventually comes back to help you. I would think those would be kind of the main things. I guess the other thing is never underestimate the value of launching yourself into something you have absolutely no knowledge of and just trying to swim. For the most part a lot of the jobs that I’ve taken, although I had the skill set to do them, I never either worked in that country or I’d never worked for that type of organization before. And the ability to just jump in and just do the best you can is probably one of the things that a lot of the people that I work with have looked for as a skill set. You can’t ever plan ahead and have every skill that’s necessary for the job and just being able to react well and learn from the experience is probably the most useful skill I have professionally.  

TURNER: I like that one, yeah. Okay, great! Wow you’ve shared so much good stuff with us and we’re excited to add this episode to our collection. So if that’s all unless you have anything else you want to add, we can close out the interview for today. And I really want to thank you for sharing everything with us.  

VIOLLAZ: Yeah no problem. I think the only other thing I would add is that when I started in this field, which is wildlife crime, there were probably I would say a handful of people that actually were as criminologists working on this. And everybody thought we were kind of crazy. Even my family was like, “are you sure you’re going to end up finding a job in this?” And it turns out that I made a good bet. But I think it wasn’t necessarily about betting on something, it was about the charisma that we brought to it made it a good bet. Because we loved what we’re doing and that translated into strong work. And therefore it became a field that is being recognized now more and more. So I would go for the crazy sometimes I guess is what I’m saying.  

TURNER: I like that advice. So we’ll let you get back to your day and I hope to touch base with you soon.  

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TURNER, VOICE-OVER: Thanks again to Julie for connecting with us all the way from Europe and sharing her story. If you’d like to discuss your potential career options, make an appointment with one of our career advisors or visit our website at cuny.is/careerplan. You can find a list of our upcoming events there. And also follow us on Twitter at @CareerPlanGC. Thanks for listening! 

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