Ben Chase

Ecology Research Technician

What’s one way that you motivate the team to keep going?

“I guess leading by example, I think is the best. And Sera and Race do a great job of that, too.”

What’s the best part of working with undergraduates and high schoolers?

“I think everybody needs three types of people in their lives: someone to mentor, someone for peer-to-peer discussions, and someone who can be a mentor to you. It's good to split your time between those people because if you're just around people at your level, you're not really learning anything that you should be doing later, or passing on your knowledge, or learning about your past experiences because you don't really have to share them again and [revisit] what you learned from them.

So you can give back and there's a lot of personal growth that comes from that to you. I think the best part of working with undergrads is the mentoring aspect. I like being able to teach a lot of what I've done, even though I'm not that far ahead of anybody. And everybody has their specialized knowledge, especially in college, when you're learning a lot of different things, so everybody can contribute and be a mentor in some way as well.”

Ben was a lead mentor with Jonathan Myers' Forest Biodiversity team during summer 2018. Learn more about their long-term temperate forest research here and their prescribed fire experiment here.