“I was young, and I thought I was tough and I knew it was beautiful and I was a little bit crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.” Those are the words of Norman Maclean, from his collection of autobiographical fictional works entitled A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (the “other stories” are “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky” and “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim'”). If Maclean’s words speak to you, a career in the Forest Service might be just the right move for you after graduation.

The US Forest Service is legally charged to “achieve quality land management under the sustainable multiple-use management concept to meet the diverse needs of people.” The United States has amazingly abundant natural resources, and the USFS ensures that they are preserved for our enjoyment. USFS employees have a wide range of day to day activities that promote the Service’s mission. If you love the outdoors, want to promote conservation, and have education in a relevant field, the Forest Service will offer you an extremely broad array of intriguing entry-level job opportunities.

About those job opportunities. We have some good news and some bad news. Bad news first. We’re not going to list individual entry-level positions for you today. The good news is that we’re leaving the research to you because the USFS has way too many entry-level openings for us to list (something like 600 this year). Just to give you a taste – USFS entry-level opportunities include jobs such as Biological Scientist, Landscape Architect, Archaeologist, and Hydrologist.

Finding jobs on their site is a little confusing (what else would you expect from the Federal Government), so we’ll guide you through the process. You can either start at their Job Openings page or you can jump straight to a search of all permanent positions. From here you can do a keyword search. If you’re looking for something specific like a location or field, feel free to choose your own keywords. We typed in “entry” and found 53 positions (many with multiple openings) that all appeared to be appropriate for someone graduating with a four-year degree.

So once you get your search results, you will get a list of positions with some basic meta information. You can click through these links to the position’s page, which then has a link to another site (we told you it’s confusing). The first time we went through their site, we thought you had to click that link to find more information on the job (so don’t click it!). We were stupid and overlooked the tabs above the job description. The tabs link to very detailed information about the openings, including a full job description, list of qualifications, salary range, other relevant information, and most importantly how to apply. If you do choose to apply for a position at the USFS, you may need to register on another website (the one with the link that you hopefully didn’t click like we did).

The USFS’s Jobs website can be pretty confusing if you haven’t used it before. Still, there is nowhere else to find this many high quality jobs in such a wide range of outdoor-related fields. If you want to work for the USFS, you might be in for some serious research and browsing around their site. That’s why we said you need to be like Norman Maclean – young, tough, and a little bit crazy.

Note: On April 22nd we revisited entry-level jobs at the US Forest Service.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• The US Forest Service Home Page
• The USFS Jobs Site
• The USFS Job Openings Page
• The USFS Job Search Page
• A Day in the Life at the USFS
• The USFS Mission

Have we told you that we’re giving away a Wii?

We've identified US Forest Service as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• agriculture
• all employers
• conservation
• forestry
• government
• nationwide

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Jobs Near You

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