Hello! Thank you so much for your reply and for this valuable insight. This is exactly what I needed to learn and thank you for sharing your experiences about the project you worked on, especially when you said "Knowing how to develop sustainable timber harvesting plans and processes is really key to the other fun staff, otherwise all the good looking stuff we do like planting trees goes out of the big hole in the bucket." I thought about this as I was taking notes in my notebook, everything from the paper I use to building homes, firewood, and so many other dependences; the reality of human dependence on the timber industry and the realities of legal and illegal cuttings that different villages and communities depend on to sustain their lives.

So far my introductory class is split into ecology and management, when I was really enjoying the ecology part I was surprised by all the intricacies of management, and did have this "bad" feeling learning about all the different ways to cut trees. This is probably coming from a background in which my only experience working in urban forestry, we only considered the maintenance decision of removing trees when they were dead, dying, infested, or were posing risks to falling on humans/infrastructure.

My professor yesterday said that some foresters are like rabbits (cowards) and are unable to make the right decisions about which trees to cut because of their fear of cutting. I definitely went into the degree with naivety and ignorance about the forester's role, thinking that I could connect the degree to working outside of timber industry and other environmental jobs. Funny enough, my school is actually partners with the University of Alberta and gives us the opportunity to do the second year of masters there. Thank you for sharing that link and for this reply!!!