Major: Outdoor Education
Graduation Year: 2006
Hey! Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I spent a good deal of time tramping around in the mountains. As I was finishing up degrees in Chinese and Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2000, I realized that the outdoors were the place that I wanted to work as well as play. After a happy but destitute year spent organic farming, I found the Pressley Ridge DaySchool, a school for emotionally disturbed youth in Pittsburgh that had an experiential education program integrated into the curriculum. This program delivers experiential programming in wilderness and classroom-based settings, and was a great place for me to learn the ropes and begin to develop program ideas and approaches of my own. After 4 years with these amazing kids, I realized that program development and leadership was the path for me, and found my way to the UNH master's program in the fall of 2004.
My research at UNH investigated the effects of short-term wilderness programming on therapeutic alliance (the working relationship that develops between clients and counselors in treatment), a powerful predictor of treatment outcomes. While at UNH, I continued to work with Pressley Ridge in a research and development fellowship that allowed me to work on experiential projects at an agency level. Surprisingly, this work took me to Budapest, Hungary in the winter of 2005 to offer experiential education training for teachers, social workers, and psychologists. The success of this trip - and a blossoming love affair with Budapest - evolved into a permanent job offer that saw me moving to Budapest in August of 2006. As a program coordinator for Pressley Ridge Central and Eastern Europe, I'm working on several projects right now. We are developing an experiential youth leadership program for Roma (gypsy) youth, piloted an adventure curriculum in a school for troubled teens, providing ongoing training and supervision for professionals interested in experiential education, and actively seeking funding to build our own outdoor learning center (think the Browne Center, but with more gulyas). I just finished writing a book on experiential education practice in school or institutional settings that is being translated into Hungarian and Portuguese, and will be the first work on experiential education in either language. It's thrilling to be in a place where the field is just finding itself, and my work here is full of surprises, success, improvisation, and most importantly - learning.
