City Trees

I consider myself very lucky to have been in the first cohort of SMA's internship program, in 2011. I was selected by the City of Surrey, British Columbia to work for a summer under the direction of Owen Croy. I was excited to both travel and see a part of the world that I had been planning on visiting for many years and to gain experience in the field I was pretty certain I wanted to pursue after graduating. Upon arriving in Surrey, I quickly realized how impres- sive its program is. Surrey has a complete tree inventory, proactive planting and pruning program, and even a multi-tiered volunteer program where more vetted and experienced volunteers are given tools by the City to help maintain City parks. It was a huge benefit to me to see and gain experience working for such an established program; I also got to enjoy the beautiful Pacific Northwest as the back- drop, and I learned a whole new suite of tree species. This experience confirmed for me that I wanted to work in municipal arboriculture/forestry. As an undergrad- uate, I had also worked in private tree care, a public garden, and doing tree inventory work. After the SMA internship, I knew I wanted to work in local govern- ment taking care of trees in the community; however, through experience and later confirmed in my grad- uate research, it can be difficult to find careers in urban forestry and municipal arboriculture/forestry. I worked in private tree care again after my I got my bachelor's degree and then went back to school, with the ultimate goal to work for local government still in mind. While at West Virginia University, I worked on the Urban Forestry 2020 project. We found that often times the first step on the urban forestry career ladder is missing. I credit the SMA intern- ship program with shepherding me past this broken rung. I knew where I wanted to get to because of the SMA internship; it just took time to get there. I currently work for the City of Alexandria, Virginia as an urban forester. It is also the city that I grew up in. It is strange to think about sometimes, but I actually changed my major to urban forestry because of a presentation by Dr. Eric Wiseman at Virginia Tech. In this presenta- tion, one of his examples of urban forestry in Virginia was the trees along King Street in Alexandria. I knew those trees and it made total sense that they should be there, but I had never thought about how they got there or who cared for them. Now I am part of the team that Former SMA Intern and Young Professional Andrew Benjamin Andrew doing on-call weekend work in Alexandria, Virginia. 32 CityTREES

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