Spotlight on: Christy McDevitt
Mary Gates Research Scholar
"My experience studying as a Mary Gates Scholar taught me more about people than anything else.
I received a Mary Gates Research Scholarship while studying development in the Bear Creek watershed with a group of other undergraduates. Our team was doing well until it came time to execute the final report and analysis for our project. Things began to fall apart and there was considerable tension among group members. Late one night, while worrying about the lack of cohesion with our group's leader, I had a revelation.
I realized our success as a team hinged on our ability to work together by focusing on the strengths of each team member. To draw together we would each have to focus on what we admired in our teammates and encourage each other to contribute in ways that brought out our strengths. I remember those days as a challenging introduction to the fact that we can't do research or science in a vacuum. It's largely about people: pitching an idea and getting buy-off from a professor or supervisor; working together as a team; adapting to changing conditions with your teammates; and presenting results in a way that can be easily understood by someone outside your lab or class. My Mary Gates Scholar experience was the first time I realized how important interpersonal dynamics can be in shaping a project's success.
I've since graduated and now work for the US Forest Service in Bend, Oregon on the Timber Operations Staff on the Bend/Fort Rock District of the Deschutes National Forest. It's one of the busiest units in the nation. We manage over 1 million acres on our district alone and produce 50 million board feet of timber a year on the forest, mostly in commercial thinning projects. We respond to the needs of an active and involved public of 80,000 people. In my position, I manage a shop of 16 permanent employees in presale operations (layout, sale design, cruising, appraisals, contract preparation), special forest products (sales of mushrooms, dry cones, firewood, and other products), and post-sale activities (small-tree thinning, whip felling, animal damage control, white bark pine research).
This fall, we prepared to move over 200 employees into a new gold level LEED certified building. It is all new construction and houses two offices that were formerly in leased spaces. I organized the planning for the move and have been responsible for information flow, employee briefings, and coordination among teams. On November 14, we moved into our unit's first permanent home in over 100 years. "