{"id":65392,"date":"2007-05-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/outdoor-classroom-inspired-north-kingstown-resident-to-excel-at-uri\/"},"modified":"2007-05-08T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-08T00:00:00","slug":"outdoor-classroom-inspired-north-kingstown-resident-to-excel-at-uri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2007\/05\/outdoor-classroom-inspired-north-kingstown-resident-to-excel-at-uri\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Outdoor classroom\u2019 inspired North Kingstown resident to excel at URI"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 8, 2007 \u2013 North Kingstown resident Michele Martel says that she was \u201csort of a tomboy\u201d as a youngster, spending her days in the woods, playing with bugs, and enjoying the outdoors. And that\u2019s exactly what she has enjoyed most about her University of Rhode Island education.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI loved the past four years because most of my classes were outdoors where we would romp through the woods and wade through ponds looking for frogs,\u201d said Martel, who will be graduating from URI on May 20 with a bachelor\u2019s degree in wildlife and conservation biology. \u201cIt was so much fun and so unconventional that it was perfect for me.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tWhen she wasn\u2019t exploring the outdoors for her coursework, Martel was exploring the outdoors for internships and summer jobs. <\/p>\n


\nShe spent the summer of 2005 as an intern at Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge in Middletown catching sparrows to test their blood for mercury, studying fish in a newly restored part of the refuge, and conducting shorebird surveys. She later worked for Save the Bay monitoring salt marshes in Bristol and Barrington. <\/p>\n


\nThis year she worked at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown as an education intern. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cI help with after school programs and environmental camps during school vacation weeks, leading the participants on salamander hunts and other fun stuff that kids like and I like, too,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ll be working there this summer as a teacher\/naturalist for their summer camps.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nIn addition to her URI classes, Martel spent a semester studying at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington \u201cbecause I wanted to go on an exchange program, but I didn\u2019t want to go too far away. And it was right on the beach. I took an environmental law class there that turned out to be one of my favorite courses.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nMartel plans to take a year off and explore her options before deciding what her future holds.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cI\u2019ll probably start substitute teaching because I really love working with kids,\u201d she said. \u201cMy mom is a teacher, and for the longest time I wanted to be a teacher, too. But then I got into wildlife and science. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cI might want to get into environmental consulting as well. There are more environmental consulting jobs out there than wildlife biologist jobs, so that\u2019s something I want to explore.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nMartel knows that she will eventually pursue a graduate degree, and she\u2019s pretty certain it will be at URI.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cI wanted to go to URI for as long as I can remember,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI lived nearby and knew it had a great marine biology and wildlife biology program. It turned out to be one of my best decisions ever.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nURI News Bureau photo by Michael Salerno photography<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 8, 2007 \u2013 North Kingstown resident Michele Martel says that she was \u201csort of a tomboy\u201d as a youngster, spending her days in the woods, playing with bugs, and enjoying the outdoors. And that\u2019s exactly what she has enjoyed most about her University of Rhode Island education. \u201cI loved the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65394,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}