Alex's First Post!

Hello everyone! This is Alex- Emily has been asking me to post on the blog, so here it goes:

I love my job! It is a ton of fun, and the days are just flying by. I guess I'll start by talking about what I do. I'm working at Disney's Animal Kingdom, and my job title is Conservation Education Presenter. I am out in the theme park every day interacting with guests, talking to them about animals and nature and giving them conservation messages. In a normal day I talk to around 1000 people- though sometimes more. Yesterday I had talked to over 300 people before 10am!

There are basically two different things that I do- one is to stand in front of some of the different animals around the park and engage the guests there. We basically first get the guests attention, because they are often running off to the next ride or whatever and completely miss the animal right under their noses. Then, we give some cool facts about the animals, and answer any questions they have. Last, we are supposed to give them a conservation message- something that they can go home and do to help protect animals and the environment.

The other thing that my role does is to run the Kid's Discovery Club locations around the park. These are basically six different games we have around the park that are all animal themed- listening to animal sounds, tracking an animal in the "wild", even matching up dinosaur fossils. They are really fun, sometimes chaotic and always interesting since all different age groups will come to play. At the end of the activity we are supposed to give another conservation message. The fun and challenging part is figuring out how to give a message that a three year old can understand one minute, then turning around and making the same game and message relevant to a thirteen or thirty year old the next.

I also really like the people I work with. Everyone is really fun and easy to work with, and most of my coworkers are recent graduates just like me. The picture above is me (in my awesome costume) and this guy Bruce that also works at Animal Kingdom, as a performer in the Festival of the Lion King show.

If I have any complaints right now, it is that by the end of the day I am completely exhausted- it takes a lot of energy to be loud and energetic for kids and crowds in the Florida heat for 8 hours a day. Also, Emily's schedule has not matched up with mine very well so far, so we haven't seen nearly as much of each other as we would like. Luckily, when we do have time together, we can do stuff like go to Magic Kingdom!