SCA Transplant Can't Wait for Winter

By Lauren Radomski | Fergus Falls Journal |November 11, 2008

Photo by Lauren Radomski
New Jersey native Michelle Tice is an intern at the Prairie Wetlands Learning Center, where she will work with local students through the end of the school year.

Michelle Tice can’t wait for winter in Otter Tail County.

After all, her home state of New Jersey sees about as much snowfall each year as the early-winter dusting Fergus Falls got in October.

“People tell me I’m in for a big surprise,” Tice said last week.

Tice, 23, is excited for the snow, but it’s not what prompted her roughly 1,500-mile trip from the East Coast to Fergus Falls in September. Tice is an intern at the Prairie Wetlands Learning Center, where she’ll spend the next several months working with the Prairie Science Class, assisting other public school programs, and honing her interest in environmental education.

“I came in really ready to learn everything and take everything in,” she said. “Each few weeks we move on to a different topic, so I try to power-learn before we start a new (one).

The prairie is a new landscape for Tice, who grew up in Bayville, N.J., a coastal community bordered by deciduous forest. Tice earned a degree in marine biology from Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in 2007, but decided she wanted to pursue a different form of conservation. She learned of the Student Conservation Association through a friend, and the nonprofit organization matched Tice’s interests with the opportunities at the PWLC, a longtime beneficiary of the group.

“In one month she just fits in like a glove,” said Teresa Jaskiewicz, environmental education specialist and one of Tice’s many PWLC mentors.

“I keep asking all of them how they got where they are,” said Tice, who is using her PWLC experience to gauge what career steps she’d like to take next.

For now, she’s enjoying measuring moose tracks, handling snakes and completing other activities with PWLC students and staff.

That and anticipating the things she’ll do this Minnesota winter. Tice has gotten a start: She saw a snowmobile for the first time a few weeks ago.

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