My name is Jeff Hankey and I am a senior biology major at Penn State University in Erie, PA. For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in nature and biology. I spend most of my free time outside in the woods either tracking animals or just enjoying nature. If I have to be inside I read a lot of wildlife guides and try to educate myself as much as I can so I'm more aware of what I see outside every day anyhow. Two years ago I compiled a lot of information about the mammals in my area and wrote an interactive computer program so that the information was more readily available when I needed to look something up. If I can find a way to compact it a little, I want to add it to this webpage for download eventually. I started this webpage in January of 2002 as a place to document things that I find and projects of my own that I'm almost always working on in some way or another.
For the past two summers (and during breaks) I've had an opportunity to work as an intern (and then a volunteer) at the Pennsylvania Wildlife Center. I really enjoyed the time I spent there and it helped me move to a new level of understanding of the wildlife and environment in our area. With more resources, I was able to research more of what I wanted to find, and I got the chance to do something that I had always wanted to do...work directly with wild animals. One other thing I enjoy about nature is that it's easy to help people learn about it. After I graduate from Penn State, I am going to go to get my teaching certificate for high school biology. My internship also allowed me to get started in that direction by letting me help educate the public about wildlife, which I really enjoy. I figure that if I enjoy it as much as I do, there's no reason why I shouldn't help other people enjoy it too. |