For those of us who work in the fields of outdoor and adventure-based experiential education and/or emergency medicine, the importance of professional medical training cannot be dismissed as merely “class time.”

While it’s true EMT training and certification may not be a requirement for many backcountry jobs or outdoor education positions, possessing certification for EMT qualifications far outweighs the Wilderness First Responder (WFR) certification, especially when it comes to landing your first or next job within this specialized field of ours.

Our certified EMS instructors are among the best in the industry and include veteran wilderness guides, EMT paramedics, firefighters, military operations specialists, and experts in critical care management. These educators provide expert instruction and personalized training that can ensure your EMT training meets and exceeds the high expectations all employers have for someone carrying such a designation.

Why You Should Consider the EMT Option

With EMT credentials in hand, our graduates have

Here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), it’s not always necessary for employees to be front and center in order to be seen as a vital asset to our operations.

Take Liz Shirley for example. Sure, this veteran outdoor program director can often be found leading our clients on a variety of backcountry trips and programs. And to be sure, hers is a friendly face around our North Carolina headquarters. But as our fulltime program coordinator, Liz most often can be found working behind the scenes — primarily on course logistics.

This busy outdoor education industry executive is in charge of staff recruitment, training, and supervision; planning new course areas; and the always evolving processes we have in place for communicating with clients and students. She also oversees all of our trip logistics — an area of focus that includes course schedules, gear, food and transportation. In addition, Liz works with our founders to review and update our corporate policies and procedures when the need arises.

Describing herself as an outdoor jack-of-all-trades, Liz was able to tear herself away from her responsibilities to answer a few personal questions

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For those interested in a career as an outdoor experiential educator, The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education wants to help you get onboard that particular ship.

But as the late comedian Jonathan Winters suggested when he famously quipped “If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it,” that vessel isn’t necessarily going to snuggle up to the dock and pick you up. It’s up to you to do the basic footwork — or perhaps backstroke is a better analogy — in order to achieve your career objectives.

(Photo: ©2013 Jaclyn E. Atkinson | Used with permission)

Many people ask us if a formal education is necessary for a career in outdoor and adventure education and we answer that question by posing another: Does a piece of paper make for a master educator? Then we answer our own question by saying, “It depends.”

In the end, it’s you who must decide what role you want to play in the outdoor industry. If your objective is to spend a few years going “wild” as a fledgling field instructor, then just head out and apply for a job. Or let’s say you want to become a leader in a specific area of the outdoor experiential education field. In this case, gobble up some on-the-job experience and a fistful of certificates and get to work.

However, if what you seek is a career as a lifelong experiential educator — with a comfortable salary and maybe some good health insurance — some formal education might be required. The secret is to find ways to get a good education without being

The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) has forged an academic relationship with the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) that will see UNCW students earning up to six academic credits for participating in and completing educationally-focused backcountry expeditions thousands of miles from campus and lasting up to a month.

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Beginning next spring, UNCW students can study in magnificent outdoor classroom settings that include Chile, Patagonia or Alaska. As a result of this accord between the university and our North Carolina-based outdoor adventure organization, these adventure courses are now counted among the approved academic activities for the university’s Department of Environmental Sciences (EVS) students.

The trio of field courses — timed to coincide with scheduled breaks during the University’s 2018/19 academic year — provide UNCW students with some serious hands-on outdoor activities and lessons that are pretty much guaranteed to

We’re sure the good folks over at the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics know this, but tt was Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, the father of Boy Scouting, who coined the phrase, “Try and leave this world a little better than you found it.”

This retired British Army officer and founder of the scouting movement was adamant about improving the environment back in 1910 — especially on the trail — and his rule was later revised to, “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.”

We here at The National Center for Outdoor Adventure & Education (NCOAE) are big fans of this “First Chief Scout,” who among many other wilderness rules, principles and musings, once said, “A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.”

Figuratively speaking, that’s a page right out of our own curriculum.

Experiencing the outdoors outside far surpasses any classroom study or indoor book reading on the topic of

Most libraries and bookstores offer up books in the science and nature section that address climate change, with titles that range from “Hot Hungry Planet” to  “Climate of Hope.” Many of these books focus on global warming, polar bears in the Arctic, flooding and other environmental crises on continents around the world.

Photo by Andy Brunner on Unsplash

However, for those of us working in the fields of outdoor education, adventure-based recreation, and summer camp, we don’t need books and photos from foreign lands to persuade us that changes are occurring on our planet — and happening at an alarmingly fast rate.

We see these changes on the rivers we run, mountains we climb, trails we traverse, and camping sites we claim and reclaim for seasonal programs. For many of us who facilitate outdoor education programs, we’ve observed

North Carolina native Adam Parish hails from a coastal town called Newport that is located about 100 miles northeast of our headquarters in Wilmington. He attends the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he is majoring in recreation, sports leadership and tourism management — a degree he expects to pick up next spring.

Prior to accepting an internship position here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), Adam was a marine science technician with the United States Coast Guard. Our newest intern says his favorite pastimes include surfing, hunting, kayaking, and exercising.

As we often do on our blog, today we offer a brief and very informal synopsis of our newest NCOAE staffer. With that being said, and the only serious question posed at the outset of the interview, below are some winsome, hardly worthwhile queries we placed before our new intern. They’re included here mostly for our edification and entertainment, as well as for “look back material” that we can reference when Adam makes it to the big time in the field outdoor- and adventure-based experiential education:

NCOAE: Why did you apply to be an NCOAE intern, and what do

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