-: I would say to students, that number one
they need to understand government.
It's a good idea to take a government class.
Because when I first started in this job,
my next door neighbor's lawyer,
and he had no clue that the park service
and the forest service were different agencies.
And they were in different departments
and they had different missions.
And so it's important in my job
to understand how government works.
It's not designed necessarily to be efficient.
It's designed to be fair.
So you can not always go in
and make it super efficient like a business.
Because you have to consider public input
and all those kinds of things.
I think that that's important.
Communication skills is something that students
really should think about getting right now
because we do so much electronic communication
that sometimes people don't have enough practice
at communicating in person.
Well there're sort of two avenues.
One would be that you're an engineer.
Most of the work that the localities design
is designed by consultant engineers.
They're hurting profit as a company
in the Blacksburg area that does a lot of design work.
And so they're very involved Greenways
and they all use them a lot.
The other avenue is the government side
working for the local government.
Sometimes you have to start at the bottom
and it doesn't hurt to do an internship
or start as a planner.
A lot of people who are in Greenway work
for the government side started as planners
or as engineers.