I know – you read majors and then my job, and I don’t make sense. However, I love the outdoors, and this summer I was able to combine all three of my loves in one internship, which I found through my involvement with the Student Conservation Association. I helped to edit a hiking guide for the Trail and made some major updates to the website, including putting new pictures up. I worked with NPS’s web content management system all summer to get the guide up for the Trail, so that has been a wonderful accomplishment. Besides copying, editing, and rewriting text for that and making sure all of the individual pages have the same format and headings, I have added field guides and a photo gallery of the Trail. I made necessary changes here and there to make the website more visitor-friendly in bits and pieces every day. In all of this I know that I contributed to the National Park Service, even though my internship was in an office. I was lucky enough to travel for my internship, and I went to the 12th Conference on National Scenic and Historic Trails in Montana. There I helped plan for a PNTS youth council, gave a speech that received a standing ovation, and went whitewater rafting and hiking. I also spent a week at George Washington’s Birthplace National Monument (and park) in Virginia and went to a meeting in one of the Capitol buildings representing today’s youth – my own generation. I got to help an amazing organization with carrying out their mission, in my
own way. Yes, I missed being out on a trail all the time, but office work doesn’t have to be all bad!

JOSH CUCINELLA, AGE 24
GAINESVILLE, FL
Masters Student – University of Florida

Since I was sixteen, I have participated in a few day hikes on the Florida National Scenic Trail, but it was not until halfway through my undergrad that I was changed forever after a hike on the Appalachian Trail. When I came back from that trip, I changed my major to Environmental Studies and decided I wanted to devote my life to nature. I am 24 now, and I am working on writing my Master’s thesis on visitation patterns on the Florida Trail. This work gets me out to the Trail at least once a month, and sometimes every weekend. The project is a mix of counting visitors by using infrared counters dispersed over the Trail and administering questionnaires to visitors along the Trail. Once a month I go out and download the counts from the counters, do some general maintenance on them, and make sure no one
has taken a baseball bat to any of them (yes, this does happen occasionally). Sometimes it’s raining, sometimes it’s 100 degrees outside, and sometimes the ticks are stacked on top of each other waiting to get you. I never mind, though. I’m doing what I would do anyway for leisure. Once the project is complete, I’m hoping we can predict the levels of use new sections of Trail will get and also predict which positive experiences the visitors will achieve.

Josh on participating in the 12th Conference:
“Before going, I knew I wanted to work in outdoor recreation, but I had no clear ideas of where or in what capacity. Meeting the great bunch of people who work in the National Trails community opened my eyes to Trails as a top possibility for career paths. I realized just how special this
“Grand Experiment” is and how passionate the people who use and work for the Trails are.
- Josh Cucinella