The following blog is an excerpt from “Once a Student, Now a Ranger” by the National Park Foundation.
After visiting Mammoth Cave on a fourth-grade field trip, Jennifer Shackelford dreamed of becoming a park ranger. Now she leads the team fostering the same experiences for thousands of students each year.
It’s mid-morning at Mammoth Cave National Park when a yellow school bus rounds the curve toward the picnic area. Before the doors open, rangers are already waving, smiling, ready to welcome another group of students to the longest known cave system in the world.
For Environmental Education Coordinator, Jennifer Shackelford, moments like this feel familiar. She once stepped off a bus just like that on a field trip when she was in fourth grade.
“By the end of that field trip, I knew I wanted to be a park ranger,” she says.
The memory is still vivid. A fourth grader on her first cave tour, Shackelford didn’t have any expectations. “Before I came on that field trip, I had never been exposed to a job like a park ranger. I don’t even think that I knew that that kind of job existed.”
Then she met the ranger leading her group underground.
“She was larger than life,” Shackelford says. “I remember thinking how amazing it was that she was so smart. She seemed to know everything. I thought, my goodness, how does she possibly know all these things? And I just thought it looked like fun. I knew I wanted to work at the park right then. I really did.”
And it wasn’t a passing phase. That field trip was the spark that shaped the trajectory of Shackelford’s career.
“A Really Cool Classroom”
Through middle school and high school, Shackelford chose activities that would get her closer to her park ranger dream. That meant science camps, outdoor summer programs, and extra questions for anyone she met who worked at the park. In her senior memory book, she wrote: “I see myself being a park ranger in five years.”
Continue reading, “Once a Student, Now a Ranger” at the National Park Foundation’s blog.
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