City Trees

Find your path to mastery by being a lifelong apprentice. Often, the best learning opportunities and experiences do not pay money, but they give you a shot at learning the ropes in a role you can be paid to do in the future. This could mean volunteering to lead a working group at your workplace or becoming an active board member of a professional or trade organization, like I did with the NYSUFC. My time with NYSUFC connected me to urban forestry dynamos from all over New York State, grew my leadership skills, and provided anecdotes and perspec- tive that have helped me be successful in my career. When asked to do something that's slightly out of your comfort zone, don't hesitate to say "yes." Being uncomfortable is a sign of growth—and we should always be trying to grow the boundaries of our comfort zone. In 2008, I was hired by New York Restoration Project (NYRP) two months before I fin- ished my degree at Georgetown. The day after I turned in my last paper, I moved to NYC to begin work in the brand-new position of NYRP Forestry Manager. I was the first full-time person they hired to manage the organization's MillionTreesNYC effort, including the planting of over 3000 trees that same spring. That meant working early mornings and late nights in all types of weather while my grad school class- mates were attending parties and backpacking Europe. When I look back, this was more than slightly out of my comfort zone! But urban forestry veterans really showed up for me with advice and connections, I learned a ton in that position, and came out of it with solid confidence in my professional abilities. That said, I do wish I had taken more time to cultivate professional networks while I was still in school. I would have been starting at second base instead of first, in terms of knowing whom to contact about what. In the course of being a lifelong apprentice, you some- times fail. A major project the NYSUFC undertook while I was president was overhauling the Council's website, which involved extensive surveys of the board to build the specs and design concepts for the site, and multiple iterations of review over the course of several months. Only when the overhaul was nearly complete did we look at the website on a cell phone and realize, wow, this website is not mobile-friendly! Turns out, there's a whole different process to designing websites for the many variations of smart phones, something the board hadn't anticipated. We struggled to achieve that at a time when we were all, frankly, tired of contemplating the website. That being said, we learned a valuable lesson in the process and were able to continue on the path forward despite the hiccup. The result was a brand-new website that we could manage and update in-house and that could also be used for conference registration: two monumental improve- ments that had been on our to-do list for years. Another part of lifelong apprenticeship is staying curious and asking questions, even if it's embarrassing to let people know you don't know something. People gener- ally like to help and teach, and curiosity and wonder are valuable qualities that will lead you to more rapid growth as well as many rich and meaningful new experiences. Seven is a Magic Number Young urban forestry professional of note, Dr. Adrina Bardekjian, who serves on the editorial review committee for City Trees and won the SMA Award of Achievement in 2018 for her many accomplishments in the field, recently wrote "Recipe for Evolving Leadership: Seven Key Ingredients" on her blog. This is highly recom- mended reading as well, and may appear in some form in a future edition of City Trees (Adrina is currently out on maternity leave). 14 CityTREES

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