Photo Credit: Courtesy of Wood Lake Nature Center
Having a career in recreation really sounds like so much fun. I’ve been teased about college courses I probably took to get my job, such as “Underwater Basket Weaving” and “How to Run Bingo Games for Seniors.” I’ve also had people tell me how lucky I am to work in a place where people come to have fun. I always agree. But how do we tell them our secret?
What exactly is our secret? That we put in incredible hours to accomplish often Herculean tasks that would be assigned to at least a dozen more people in any other profession? And we really are professionals who have attended real universities and taken demanding classes that we rely on for the jobs we do.
A New Curriculum
The other part of the secret is that we are never adequately prepared for what we are asked to do in our coveted positions. If we were, our university class descriptions would read something like this: