NewKid said:
Working on my prereq's at the moment, haven't decided yet. I don't seem to have too many choices in my immediate area. Joliet Junior College seems to have a well respected program... I was talking with a Care of Trees guy a while back and he mentioned they had been working with a school in Wisconsin to include climbing and arborist specific training in their prog. Do you know where that is?
Michael
Oh sure, there are a couple of options. Joliet has a program for arboriculture that you could check out. But the schools in Wisconsin that TCOT person was telling you about are the technical colleges, Milwaukee Area Technical College and Mid-State Technical College. Both have climbing class, but the Mid-State campus has a full-fledged arborist program with an indoor climbing lab.
They've been fortunate enough to have received a huge federal grant for equipment, allowing them to get plenty of modern climbing equipment, a chipper, computers, the fanciest indoor tree climbing setup I've ever seen, and more. In addition, their instructors are noted in the field and have strong educational/teaching credentials. If you're interested, it's a two year program in Wisconsin Rapids.
The Milwaukee campus has an arboriculture track in their horticulture program, again, with a great instructor. If you're thinking horticulture and arboriculture in two years = great program.
If you're thinking about a four year program, you can complete the two year degree at Mid-State and get a bachelor's degree in two more years at UW-Stevens Point (where I went to school). For the best, IMO, go to UW-Stevens Point from the beginning and take the climbing classes at Mid-State (which is what I did.
).
The Care of Trees is closely involved with the programs at Mid-State and UW-Stevens Point, so I'm not surprised that you heard about them from the person you talked to. In fact, I bet I know who you talked to about it. :angel:
One final note - the UW-Madison campus has a forestry program, but you won't learn about arboriculture or urban forestry since it's not nearly as applied and is far more research focused. If you decide that's what you want to get into, I would pursue it on the graduate level. If you want to pursue forestry in an applied sense on the graduate level, look at the University of Minnesota-St. Paul for a great program or something like Purdue if you're more interested in the landscape architecture side. There's a lot of options, and don't limit yourself to North America. I visted schools in Germany before I settled on the program that I'm at now. It ended up being in my backyard, but hey, sometimes you don't have to look far. Sometimes you find more looking than you do finding.
