Introductory natural-resource courses at Purdue University are often taken by undergraduates from a wide variety of backgrounds to satisfy general science requirements. These courses therefore have large enrollments (>400 students per semester) of individuals with little background in the natural resource field. It is difficult to teach large groups of...
Most of the forces in academia work to develop highly specialized individuals. Training comes primarily from a single person, the dissertation advisor. Detailed field study of various forest types or physiographic provinces is often limited to where we trained and where we work (sometime both are in the same location...