Learn more about how to find a career – or volunteer job! – in the vastly varied field of wildlife, as we highlight a wide range of backgrounds and education paths that can lead people to work with wildlife. The range of career paths that lead to working with wildlife is about as varied as the actual wildlife all around us. This episode features several different people working with or for wildlife, highlighting a collection of stories from their daily lives. Learn more about how to find a career – or volunteer job! – in this field, including the range of backgrounds and education paths that can lead people to work with wildlife. Even with a diversity of people, organizations, and agencies, roles, and responsibilities, a number of these professionals work together for a common goal of helping protect wildlife and the environment.

Students learn that ordinary citizens, including students like themselves, can make meaningful contributions to science through the concept of "citizen science." First, students learn some examples of ongoing citizen science projects that are common around the world, such as medical research, medication testing and donating idle computer time to perform scientific calculations. Then they explore Zooniverse, an interactive website that shows how research in areas from marine biology to astronomy leverage the power of the Internet to use the assistance of non-scientists to classify large amounts of data that is unclassifiable by machines for various reasons. To conclude, student groups act as engineering teams to brainstorm projects ideas for their own town that could benefit from community help, then design conceptual interactive websites that could organize and support the projects.

This article describes how schools can involve local organizations in a festival or informal learning event.