Featured Alumni

Rachel Hyman

Winds scented with sage brought Rachel Hyman to the desert. That, and a stellar position as an Education Intern with Arches National Park's very own Canyon Country Outdoor Education program. When she's not traversing down sandstone dunes in search of pothole dwellers with Moab elementary students, Rachel is scouring cliffs with her newly acquired binoculars for some of favorite desert residents: birds. She is delighted to call ‘home’ the place that inspired writers like Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams to share this epic landscape with the world. The sprawling rocky geometries of Arches National Park inspire her to write about her experiences exploring the natural world and snap photographs of her findings. It is her hope that while exploring the silhouette of Delicate Arch one moon-bright night she will see the glowing eyes of a Ring-Tailed Cat peeking out from behind a bush. One can only hope.

“At Bard I wanted to do something that allowed me to explore my interest in creating an interface between people and their built and natural environments. Within the EUS program, I was looking to engage in a discourse that dealt in terms of creating successful models for sustainable, healthy communities: CSAs, urban gardens, and environmental education programs that serve as cooperative forces within civic infrastructure and urban ecosystems.”

“In the Fall after graduating from Bard I began working at Arches National Park as an Environmental Educator. I teach ecology to elementary students from the town of Moab. I live and work in the park. I wake up every morning with lizards crawling across my windows, dwarfed in the shadow of towering, blistered sandstone cliffs behind my house.”

“My last three years at Bard College I conceived, created, and launched with another EUS grad, Honoro Montano, the Young Naturalist Initiative (YNI), an environmental education outreach program designed to teach outdoor science education to underserved elementary school children from metropolitan areas in the Hudson Valley. I felt humbled by realizing how challenging the job was. And how enjoyable. How hard it was at first to communicate the tangible physical presence of a forest or a mountain stream in terms of a worthwhile, memorable story of the natural world. But more often I was inspired. It turned out that teaching children in a natural setting was one of the most worthwhile, helpful things I did at Bard, without knowing it was helpful until later. Lesson after lesson I adjusted and reworked my approach as an educator. Some days I did well, other days were harder. All that time I was observing nuance, inflection, timing, how intentionality mattered to my students. Falling back on being patient and present is hugely important in any work. The lesson in humility that comes with working with children day after day is so valuable. At Bard I had the freedom and community to explore what it means to be an educator.”