Sightings | Alumni Profile
A Tale of Two Foresters
Graduating 53 Years Apart, Randy Boggess and Paul Trianosky are Sterling Representatives of Their Classes at Duke p.2
Paul
Trianosky
A new emphasis on conservation
When Paul Trianosky was studying forestry as an undergraduate at Virginia
Tech in the 1980s, his career options were more varied, but he, too, was
drawn to a government agency. After working with the USDA Forest Service
as part of a co-op program in which he attended classes half-time, he found
postgraduate employment as a field forester for the Virginia Department
of Forestry.
"Like a lot of young foresters, I wanted to work in the woods," says Trianosky, whose pursuit of an undergraduate forestry degree was built on his love of science and his passion for being outdoors. For six years after graduation, he got to do exactly what he'd dreamed of—working in the woods—and he was good at his job.
"When you're doing all right," Trianosky says,"you begin thinking about the bigger picture and what's next." For some people, that would mean looking to the next rung on the career ladder. But Trianosky was aware of a growing conflict between his personal convictions and his professional obligations. Called on to advise a private landowner what to do with a patch of old-growth swampland near Emporia,Va., he recalls that as a forester, his professional recommendation to the landowner would be to cut it down in order to put the land to more lucrative use. But deep down, he felt that such rare habitat should be preserved.
Trianosky set his sights on a job with The Nature Conservancy or a similar organization, but he knew his traditional forestry background wasn't going to be the ticket to that sort of position. He consulted colleagues and professors from Virginia Tech, and he kept hearing about Duke, where the School of Forestry was offering something called a Master of Environmental Management (MEM) degree.
He entered Duke in 1991, the year the School of the Environment was created by combining the former forestry school and the Duke Marine Laboratory, but Duke had been offering the MEM degree since the mid-1970s, when national concern about natural resources and environmental problems had led the school to expand its curriculum.
Randy
Boggess
Growth and change at Illinois
During his first year at Duke, Boggess had met his future wife when he
and a fellow student spied two young women sitting on the quadrangle near
the hospital—behind the present Old Chemistry building."We went over to
pass the time of day, and that's how I met my wife," he says.
Almost 20 years after they married—and four children later—Boggess and his wife decided it was time to move to town. The Dixon Springs research station was in a poor and underpopulated part of Illinois, and the nearest town was 12 miles away. Their oldest child was ready for college, and his wife thought they needed more social contacts. Although he had mixed feelings about becoming"a little fish in a big pond," he readily accepted an invitation to move to the university's Urbana-Champaign campus and join the graduate research faculty.
photo captions: Randy Boggess; Duke Forest historical photo; Paul Trianosky