Scientists and Professionals On The Job

Stanley C. Ernst, associate Extension editor, Agriculture, Office of Information, and Applied Communications, and Kenneth W. Reisch, associate dean, College of Agriculture, The Ohio State University, Columbus.

The old gray mare might not be what she used to be, but neither is the college student studying her. In fact, students in agricultural colleges are much different than in the early days of the Nation's land-grant system. Where once colleges of agriculture trained students to be farmers and home economics teachers, today's students are being educated to go new places and do things many people would never think go along with a degree in agriculture. Agriculture programs at the Nation's land-grant universities are graduating food scientists, marketing specialists and economists, as well as providing an excellent foundation for degrees leading to jobs as lawyers, medical doctors, editors, teachers, and a host of other professions.

A recent survey of agricultural colleges in the Midwest showed barely 10 percent of those schools' graduates going into farming or professional farm management. Over 28 percent of the graduates entered some form of agribusiness, 13 percent went into another industry, and nearly 14 percent entered graduate or advanced professional studies.

The advanced scientific training available through agricultural colleges is just one reason those who use agricultural colleges as a springboard into other areas took a nontraditional route to their career. Some of these people come from the traditional farm background and want to move into other fields. Other students have no relationship at all to farming but find agriculture is the career they want to pursue. And still more find that an agricultural degree is a great stepping stone into unique careers.

Take Barbara Durrant for instance. While many of her peers at North Carolina State University were content with studying pigs and cattle, she had other plans for her expertise in reproductive physiology.

"I never wanted to spend my life Producing domestic animals strictly for slaughter," she says. "I went into animal science to get a good overall basis and physiological training with the thought of applying my skills to endangered species."

Everything from antelopes to zebras are part of Durrant's "herd." As the San Diego Zoo's reproductive physiologist, she is working in a field that is both challenging and sometimes frightening. Unlike traditional livestock studies, zoo researchers may have only one or two individuals of a specie to work with. This requires greater caution in research, she says, and there is little chance to gather results from large groups and often no prior work to base her studies on.

Barbara S. Durrant, San Diego Zoo's reproductive physiologist, works to increase populations of endangered species like the South African cheetah.

When she left North Carolina State in 1979 with a Ph.D. in Animal Science, Durrant had most of her experience with domestic animals. Today, she may be working with exotic birds, tomorrow it might be peccaries, a relative of the domestic hog. Her traditional training has paid off for the exotic species for which she is now responsible.

"I'm seeing that embryo transfer is not the savior of endangered species that we once thought it could be. Going to my background in animal science I know the primary genetic improvement method hasn't been embryo transfer but artificial insemination. I'm finding that to be the same with the more exotic animals."

Is there room in the zoo business for more Barbara Durrant's? Currently, she says, only three zoos San Diego, Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati have full-time reproductive physiologists on their staffs. That should change. More and more zoos are recognizing the need for larger research groups and that should mean more openings for physiologists and other specialists in the field.

A don't think most agricultural schools or animal science students think much about the exotic animals as a profession," Durrant said. "But it's something more and more of them need to consider. Virology, endocrinology, genetics, nutrition, physiology and animal behavioral sciences are all areas where we need specialists, and animal science is a good background. True, there aren't all that many jobs in zoos right now, but I think that as administrators continue to recognize the need for good research, we're going to see more opportunities opening up."

Sometimes things don't turn out the way they were intended to. Steven Gerdes intended to get his B.S. in agriculture and specialize in finance. Somewhere along the way the Walnut, Illinois farmboy took an entrance exam for law school. Now Gerdes specializes in federal income taxation, particularly as it applies to municipal finance, for Vinson & Elkins a law firm of more than 400 attorneys in Houston, Texas.

"I hadn't really thought about law, but for some reason, the accounting program at the University of Illinois was full of pre-law students," Gerdes says. "I was taking all these accounting courses to pass a CPA exam and started thinking about law from being surrounded by those people. I finally said, 'OK, I'll take the entrance exams for law school, and if I can get into a good one, I'll do it.'"

After graduating with highest honors from Illinois in May 1977, Gerdes entered Harvard Law School and received his J.D. degree in May 1980. He says he was probably the only student in the Harvard Law School at the time with a degree in agriculture.

Gerdes' roots were still on his mind after law school, but Vinson & Elkins offered a different opportunity from the firms he interviewed that had agricultural specialties. In short, the Houston firm offered what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

"This position provided me an opportunity to do something I won't be able to do again. I ended up here because I wanted to try it. This is a very specialized firm, and municipal finance is the specialty they've assigned me here. While it doesn't deal with agriculture all that often, occasionally I have something involving a grain elevator or agribusiness and at least I know what they're talking about."

In some parts of the country, agricultural law is a big interest, and some college students today may take that route, Gerdes says. But lawyers always have options. Legal principles are basically the same whether they concern municipal finance or farm foreclosure, he says.

The key for prospective law students is the education they receive. Gerdes says his degree in agriculture prepared him for law school. But getting locked into a career-oriented mindset, first with accounting and later law, may have kept him from making the most of his opportunities.

"In an agriculture major, you often have a lot of electives that enable you to diversify. I think I fell victim to the philosophy that if you can't use it on the job, you don't need it. Students should go ahead and broaden their horizons take a classical literature course or some art history or whatever. Those are the kind of things you won't have time to do later that you have the opportunity to benefit from in college, and who knows when they might come in handy."

Some people with degrees in agriculture or home economics have had diverse educational experiences, many times caused by a change in plans.

Cassie Murphy-Cullen had bachelor's and master's degrees in political science and was teaching the subject at Texas Tech University while preparing for law school in the mid-1970's. A personal tragedy made her think about how families interact with the medical system, and she found a course in Texas Tech's Department of Home and Family Life that appeared helpful. That course's focus on family behavior in crisis times changed her career focus, she says.

Murphy-Cullen completed a Ph.D. program in family relations at Texas Tech in 1979, specializing in family interaction and family intervention with minor work in child development and medical sociology. She is now part of the Department of Family Practice and Community Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.

"I feel very secure in my educational background and its relevancy to a post-graduate residency training program," she says. "I go on daily rounds with the residents to see their in-hospital patients and am available the rest of the day to discuss patient care and personal concerns with the residents working in the family practice center. If you help the physician and care about how he or she is reacting, assistance to the patient and family is more effective. I observe not only from the perspective of how they (the physicians) are doing with their patients, but how they are doing, in general, as human beings in terms of taking care of themselves and their families."