Only a couple weeks in, I traveled to Dallas with my RTCA Austin Team for a steering committee meeting with city staff members for a project involving a recreation trail around an airport. This experience introduced me to the other members of my RTCA Texas team and their organization of the project planning process. As of now, I am juggling a couple of tasks in about eight different projects- so I am never left with nothing to do. I’m finding that all of our projects are unique in their own way whether its the location, the community, or the project needs.
When I first started my fellowship, I found myself experiencing a bit of imposter syndrome, where I felt that I didn’t have the skills to call myself a “community planning fellow”. The other people on my team are titled Community Planners and specifically studied community planning and went to planning school. I, on the other hand, have skills and experiences in some community planning projects but not the same specific training from my environmental science and environmental management degrees.This could just be me being a nervous new kid because the further along I get in my fellowship and the more involvement I have, the more capable I feel. I find myself having some outside perspective in some projects and thoughts of different relevant factors. Hopefully in the next couple months I can say I feel confident in my abilities and take on more diverse tasks.
A couple weeks ago I met up with other NPS fellows and Hispanic Access Foundation staff in Washington D.C for a Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Conference! It was so nice to meet with other fellows going through similar experiences as me and hear about the kind of work they are doing in their own cities.I look forward to connecting with them more and see where the future takes us all in our careers.
Meeting in D.C allowed us to learn more about the Department of the Interior, the hiring process and the Public Land Corp. I think the conference did a great job of giving us a platform to network with each other, get back to nature in a big city with forest bathing, and teach us the ins and outs of what runs RTCA and what we work on. I think the conference lacked some in-depth career advice, needed experiences from Latinx representatives that work for NPS, and I wish we learned about the kinds of roles/skills that are needed in RTCA.
In my future with RTCA I hope I can learn more about the world of community planning and contribute more of my own skills. Community-based environmental management is incredibly important in all of my projects and I am proud to be expanding that skills, but I hope to also bring more technical skill to our projects as well. I’m looking forward to expanding to more green infrastructure projects and possibly providing evaluation metrics of projects that are near finishing to see just how effective our services are to the communities we serve. Overall it's been a great start and I’m excited to see where the rest of the year takes me.
Written by Sydney Garcia, Community Planning Fellow, in Austin, TX.
