Ethnobotanical Work Experience

[Francois le Danque]

Hi everyone, this is my first post.

I have a problem. I go to school (I'm in year eleven) and in a few weeks I am required to undertake work experience. If you don't know, this is where we go to work somewhere for a week, getting paid very little and supposedly getting used to being in the workforce.

I'm very interested in ethnobotany and pharmacology and so my first thoughts of who to ask were places like Herbalistics, Wandjina Gardens and (of course) SAB.

So what's the problem?

All of these places are very far away. I live in Victoria and there is nowhere i can stay in any other state. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for where i could possibly do it here, preferably in or around Gippsland, Melbourne or Mornington Peninsula.

Thanks heaps for any help you can give me, and it's great to be a member.

[Rev]

If you are under 18 that might be an issue

All the businesses here diverge into their ethnobotany market specialisation but they arent essentially any different from a mainstream biz in most ways

all pay tax, do accounting, they use online commerce (OScommerce ) for the webcart , communicate online and in the nursery whether you are growing hallucinogenic plants or ornamntals the layout is the same

In fact when it comes to the specifics there isnt much or indeed any difference between whats commercially avilable and what we all sell here. the selection is just tighter and theres a few specialties that are still closley reated to and propagated the same as some other common plant - even something as exotic as psychotria s still only propagated using the same methods they use for begonias

as far as i know theres no school of ethnobotany. You are going to have to borrow very widely indeed to get the grounding in skills and knowledge you require.

If botany and pharmacology are your interets then why not try medicinal herb gardens/farms/wholesalers, botanic gardens, native plant growers, University greenhouses (natural products science), hell even a specialty mushroom farm ;)

its all useful. learn what you can cos the pieces DO actually fit later on

good luck

Edited March 4, 2006 by Rev

[teonanacatl]

if i were you i would look at a place where you would like to work, work experience is a good foot in the door if your a good worker. so a nursery, wholesale you will prolly learn more, or a mushroom farm are great ideas. work hard and u can get a job out of it. if you want more science things then maybe se if you can get work experience collecting plant samples for a natural product chemist, you would be pretty useless to a chemist doing anything else, but if you help collect material you can chat, and if you learn some basic chemistry you might understand what he is doing and he could explain it to you, whilst i doubt you would get a job its great way to see what its like.

[Francois le Danque]

Thanks for your help guys. However I really don't know where to look for these things. I might try the botanical gardens, but other than that i don't know where to start.

[apothecary]

Yellow Pages? Internet?

[indigo264nm]

It all depends on what way you wish to approach this field.

If you're interested mostly in phytopharmacology then you wouldn't particularly be wanting work experience in the botanical gardens weeding the beds in the rainforest section.

If you're interested in the botanical side of the field, then obviously study botanical stuff - but think about how that is going to be useful to you unless you have intentions of wanting to identify, classify and discover plants for a living (and unfortuantly I don't think many would hire you to specialise in classifying hallucinogenic plants). If you actually want to get your ass overseas and be involved in the true side of ethnobotany then I'd say look into things like anthropology and linguistics.

And of course if you wanna get into the propagation side of things, get yourself to a wholesale nursury for work experience.

My point is get work experience in something that is actually going to be relavent to where you're planning on taking this ambition... Personally I never even bothered - I never did work experience as somehow I got out of it. Ethnobotany is not realistically a profession, but the fields that ethnobotany is made up of contain many possible ideas for studying and career choice.

Good luck and have fun with it all, whatever you end up doing.