Kelcie Troutman had the perfect internship this summer with the opportunity to follow her passion working outdoors with wildlife. She says her experience at Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge was so great she wants to pursue more internships.
Troutman, a junior majoring in marine biology at the St. Thomas campus of the University of the Virgin Islands, was an intern in the Student Temporary Employment Program (STEP) through the National Student Conservation Association with AmeriCorps.
The program provides students opportunities to serve and protect national parks and forests and urban communities. She says the lengthy application focused on questions pertaining to outdoorsy things which she loves.
This summer she got an introduction to refuge management. She dealt with least terns, providing nesting material and counting and marking eggs. And she cleaned up a few beaches.
Troutman, 20, says the best part of her internship was doing outreach conducting sea turtle nesting and hatching watches with the public through the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
“The trickiest part of the job is finishing at 2 a.m. and having to get up for work the next day after only a few hours of sleep,” Troutman says.
Her other job is also as an intern, in the Forestry Division of the Department of Agriculture, where Troutman says she gets into agriculture, forestry, land conservation and taking care of native species.
Troutman says the environment is all interconnected. What happens in one habitat can directly or indirectly affect another.
“Mangroves and coral reefs are prime example of this,” Troutman says. “With mangroves gone, sediment that is usually trapped by their roots flows freely to the ocean and smothering nearby coral reefs.” She is concentrating on the study of mangroves and coral reefs at UVI.
Marilyn Chakroff, acting head of Forestry at the Department of Agriculture, said Troutman has used perseverance to get what she wants. “She is very good with follow-up,” Chakroff says. “When she finds an opportunity she doesn’t let it get away.”
Last summer she started out as a volunteer at the Department of Natural Resources East End Marine Park and some funding came in and she got a little stipend. With the STEP program, students get money for books, tuition and loans.
Troutman heard about the program through word of mouth. She says the program provides so many opportunities and she wants others to have the experiences she has had. She wants to spread the word posting cards and posters at local schools. For more about the STEP internships go to www.thesca.org.
Troutman was born in Newark, N.J., to Barbara and Carnell Troutman. Barbara, originally from St. Croix, decided her island home was a better place to raise children than New Jersey so they moved to St. Croix in 1992 just after Kelcie was born. Kelcie Troutman says she definitely has supportive parents and they have helped her pursue her dreams.
Troutman graduated from St. Joseph’s High School in 2010 and went off to the University of Hawaii in Hilo. She says Hawaii was a fabulous place but it was too expensive to live there and she wanted to come back to St. Croix.
Troutman says she hopes to do more internships, possibly traveling (which she loves to do) to Louisiana, South Carolina and Guam before she settles into a biologist’s job on St. Croix.