A Note to Prospective Students and Post-docs
My lab usually includes 4-7 graduate students. In Spring 2008, there are four PhD students
and one MS student. You can read about their projects on the Current Research
page. All students advised by
Carol Chambers
or me meet weekly as the Wildlife Lab Group. If we can ever manage to coordinate
even more schedules, Tom Sisk,
Tad
Theimer, and their students may someday merge into a Conservation Biology
Megagroup.
NAU has many resources that make this an excellent place to pursue your interests in
conservation biology and wildlife ecology. In addition to MS and PhD degrees offered by
the School of Forestry, NAU's excellent Biology
Department offers MS and PhD degrees, and the Center
for Environmental Science and Education offers a MS in Environmental Science
and Policy. There are outstanding faculty
in all 3 of these units, and I encourage you to contact my colleagues in these other
units. Promoting good science and helping students toward successful careers is more
important to each of us than the body count in our respective departments, and we will
each give you our best advice. Other resources on campus include the Colorado
Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (USDI),
Colorado Plateau Field Station (US Geological
Survey), the Ecological Restoration Institute, the Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research,
the Center for Sustainable Environments, and
a unit of the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain
Research Station.
Please visit several of these sites to decide if NAU
and this lab will meet your goals. You can contact my current graduate students by E-mail from
links on the Current Research page. If you are interested in working
here, please
send me a cover letter, resume, photocopy of GRE scores, and a list
of classes taken and grades (or photocopy of transcripts). Please send the
documents by snail mail (if you live outside North America, E-mail attachments
are OK) to
Paul Beier
Box 15018
Northern Arizona
University
Flagstaff AZ
86011-5018
I will keep your materials on file for at least 2
years. When I get funding for a project, I will review all packets received in
the previous 24 months old, will talk to each applicant, and give full and fair
consideration to everyone. Please be aware that the lab has 0-2 vacancies per
year, so no matter how qualified you are, I may be unable to offer you a position.
I will not accept a student until we have secured funding for your
research project. Good research costs money. You should be wary of any professor
who offers to accept you into a graduate program on a hope and a prayer that
funding will arise somewhere. Remember that when you enter a graduate program,
you are (usually) giving up a job and moving – no small gamble on your part. In
return, your mentor should be ready to invest some resources in you and your
project!
A note on studying large carnivores: I regularly
receive inquiries from students with a burning desire to study pumas or other
large carnivores. I do encourage every person to pursue their dreams with zeal.
However, without being too negative, I also encourage carnivore enthusiasts to
think about how carnivores fit into your long-term educational and career goals.
In particular, I feel it is unwise to study large carnivores for a Master’s degree. Most interesting
questions about large predators require more years of work than appropriate for
an MS program. The risk of failing to get a meaningful data set is enormous. I
encourage you to study an interesting ecological and management question
on non-carnivores for your MS degree, and save the carnivore study for your PhD
or postdoctoral work.
Email Paul.Beier at nau.edu
