Dear Horticulture Major Beginners: What You Should Know

Choosing a major in college is hard. Generally speaking, you have freshly graduated from high school and you are still figuring out who you are. If you were like me, you knew that you wanted to make a difference, however you didn't know how. Perhaps you're parents influenced you to take up a similar career path that they did. Maybe they pressured you to make something better of yourself than they did of themselves and they're telling you to become a doctor, or maybe you don't even know what you want to do or be, and that's okay. That's actually normal. 

There were very few things that I knew for sure. Actually, I think I knew what I didn't want to be more than what I did. I knew that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life behind a desk, as I had spent my entire high school career. I knew that I wanted to travel outside of the country and see the world. And I also knew that I had an artistic mind. After taking many personality quizzes online, (which I highly suggest everyone do), one career path stood out to me: horticulture. So here's to those students who are thinking about pursuing horticulture, or to those that are beginning their journeys! Hopefully this post helps.

So the first thing any person wanting to major in horticulture should know is that not every college offers it as a major. Secondly, if there isn't a school in your state that offers the major you want, all you have to do is prove to the nearest school's office of financial aid the lack of representation in your home state and you will be able to receive in-state tuition at that school. This goes for any major and a lot of people don't know that very helpful bit of information. 

Moving forward, there are many different concentrations of horticulture and the one that is best for you all depends ultimately on what field you are interested in doing. There are three general sectors of horticulture (that I've heard of) and they're broken down into these categories: sales, research, and production. 

If you are interested in sales this typically means that you want to work in a garden center where the product is already at a mature state and you will be dealing with customers face to face. Or this means that you want to work at a florist, designing and delivering bouquets. This might even mean you want to design and build floral arbors and everything needed for weddings, which means you will be consulting with brides and whoever is paying. Maybe this means that you want to become an interior landscaper where you would design higher class customers' houses and places of business, hospitality and medicine to promote an atmosphere of being environmentally aware. This could also mean you want be a landscape designer. Honestly, the options in the business sector of horticulture are countless with the tools of social media and online platforms that reach a wide range of customers or if you live in a big city where money flows progressively. The horticultural concentration for this career field usually is something that sounds like "horticulture management."

There is also a plethora of options of careers in horticultural research. You could work in a germplasm repository where seed is held and distributed throughout states and countries. This is fascinating if you work your way up this system, because you could be traveling from country to country trading seed and information regarding the success of crops and actively addressing the global issue of feeding the world's growing population. This could also mean that you could work in plant pathology, diagnosing plant diseases and the best approach to eradicate them. Or you could work in a laboratory, researching and breaking down plants on the cellular level, studying their proteins. Maybe you're a university professor, teaching students and conducting research on the side (meaning your getting funding from the school you're working at). Or maybe you're working in botanical gardens and arboretums learning how some plants grow best and where they came from. I, personally, see myself pursuing a career in research because I am very passionate about the green movement that is circulating right now. I hope it influences public servants in the United State's political realm to implement and prioritize laws protecting the environment. The horticultural concentration for this career field is something like "floriculture and ornamentals."

The last sector is production. I interned at a huge production greenhouse facility called Neal Mast Greenhouses for a summer. They produce for Walmart. It was an amazing experience I feel lucky to have. Working in production means that you will work at different stages in the growth of crops. This could mean you germinate plants in greenhouses from seed to plug, or you grow plugs to planters, or planters to shipment. Typically, you are a grower responsible for the vitality of bays of crops, where you will monitor their growth, pest occurrences, and uniformity. You will spray plant growth regulators, pesticides or fungicides and beneficial insects. It is really cool to see the development of different plants over time, but these jobs can be more menial because there is only so much you can do for production. Working in production could also mean that you are a farmer to fields of crops. This clearly is dependent on the USDA's program of APHIS (Animal and Plant Heath Inspection Service) to keep away air borne pathogens that could harm your crop and the weather for your success. You could also be an arborist which is literally a tree surgeon where you will literally get paid to climb trees for a living, and it's a little more complicated than that. The concentration for this is agronomy, construction or just 'ole regular science. 

These have been the things I have learned as a horticulture student and I'm sure there are more growing careers in horticulture as we speak and more that I don't even know about. I am excited to learn and see what will be created next. I hope this post helped you on your understanding of the versatility of a horticulture degree and motivate you to become a horticulture student!