So, my name is Madison Heiser. I'm a
Geoscientist-in-the-Park intern through AmeriCorps
and Conservation Legacy, and I'm part of
media team at Shenandoah National Park.
So, I chose Shenandoah because it's
really close to home for me. It's between
where I grew up and where I go to school
out at James Madison University in
Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Shenandoah is really unique in the
fact that it has a
dedicated media team. So, it has this
really great group of people that all
work to make
visual media for throughout the park, and
work with a lot of interpretation rangers, and rangers in education department
to just make a lot of really awesome
visual information.
So, my experience with science has always been that it's very
number heavy; so based on facts and
figures and that's just not how I learn.
I do so much better with visual learning,
and so it's been really great to be at
Shenandoah and learn so much about the
unique wildflowers, and the animals, and
the flowers and fauna, and
the culture, and to be able to take that
and make that in a visual media form;
so just make that in a way that it's
easy for everyone to understand.
No matter what age you are
to enjoy a piece of Shenandoah just
right on your screen. So, when I actually first arrived back in
May, the park was closed to the public. So, what I was a part of was
making probably 100, 200 signs
dedicated simply to the specific
closures we had, and then kind of the phased
reopening of Shenandoah and letting the
visitors come back in,
and just making sure that throughout the
park had CDC guidelines,
and knew the expectations and how to be safe.
Media team especially has been really
important during
the Covid pandemic with making
sure that we still have
the access to our visitors that they
would normally receive; like, they can
still see programs and everything,
and so much has geared to being online
with everyone's social distancing,
and so it's just been really important
to have a great team to put videos
together for that.
Without The Shenandoah National Park
Trust I would not be able to be an
intern here at Shenandoah this year, especially
with so many difficulties because of
Covid. It's been a really important year
to be here, and i'm just so grateful, that even
though with everything going on, I've
still had the opportunity to be here, so
I just, I can't thank The Trust enough for all
of their efforts and resources that they've put into so I
could have one of my best summers.
