Sara Mueller is the executive director of Wildlife Leadership Academy (WLA), a non-profit that organizes five weeks of “field school” each summer for students to get involved in conservation. After field school, students do community hours to bring awareness to the cause, helping them lead their community toward a more sustainable future.

Mueller completed her bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and PhD at Penn State in Wildlife and Fisheries Science. With extensive knowledge of macroinvertebrates and fisheries, she works to educate young people about the environmental problems of today, and mentors them in how to move forward on their own. She coordinates and facilitates all WLA’s fisheries-related education for students, from choosing which topics they should learn to inviting guest speakers to the field schools to share their knowledge. She also manages administrative tasks and camp organization. Her research before WLA related to brook trout, looking into their environment and conservation.

Through her work, she can reach thousands of young people interested in conservation and help ignite their passion for sustainability.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you end up at Penn State as a Wildlife and Fisheries Science undergraduate student?

I grew up in State College and had ties to the University. I saw what others were doing with their degrees from Penn State and wanted to be like them. When I was a leader in training at Shavers Creek Environmental Center in high school, I was watching the counselors teach others about environmental topics, and I said, “How do I get to be where you are?” They talked about majors like Agricultural Extension Education and Environmental Resource Management. And when Dr. Milton Newberry, who was a student at the time, mentioned Wildlife and Fisheries Science, I never looked back. I fell in love with the approach that major took to learning about conservation.

I think the major provides that interconnectedness of nature and humanity that we don’t necessarily assume going in. We have such a passion for the outdoors that makes us want to help, and that is really achieved through the management of people to meet the objectives that are driven by humans. So, we must take a bigger look at ourselves and nature.

Why focus on aquatic ecosystems? On brook trout?

I went into my undergraduate degree in the wildlife option initially since I always thought that I would be working with what we call the “warm fuzzies”: the mammals and the birds. But I had a recollection from my childhood stemming back to Shaver’s Creek of flipping over rocks and doing macroinvertebrate studies.

I remember one year we had an insect that didn’t key out to anything on the macroinvertebrate dichotomous key, so we had thought we discovered something new. As it turns out, that’s a very limited key, and it was actually a very common kind of mayfly, but I had never seen one before. I just always wanted to know the names of things.

Being in the Schreyer Honors College, I knew I was going to need to do undergraduate research, and I thought, “If I had a lot of fun with aquatic macroinvertebrates as a kid, why not continue to explore that pathway?” I found a lab that needed someone to sort macroinvertebrate ID samples and somebody who could go in the field, so I applied. I had my first summer job with them, and I spent over a decade with that lab, as I continued through my career. My large focus with that lab was aquatic macroinvertebrates, and they finally got me to do fish-related research for my PhD.

I did spend one summer as a bat technician for a consulting company. And, at the time, I was not well suited for sitting alone on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, which caused me to go back to fish very quickly. I try to stress to students that it’s just as important to know what you don’t want to do as what you do want to do.

Why continue forward at Penn State for both your master’s and PhD? What caused you to want to stay?

It was the right decision for where I was in life. I encourage folks to seek different perspectives. Get as much of a well-rounded education as you can. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone, because that’s where you do your growing. But it’s okay if at a certain stage you need to stay put. Between family obligations and personal decisions, know that if you stay in one place you can still find the opportunities to grow. And so that’s what I did.

During my master’s, I took water law and environmental law courses over at Penn State Dickinson Law, and it opened my eyes to things that I hadn’t been taught in policy classes yet. It equipped me to have my first teaching gig as an adjunct instructor at Penn State DuBois in natural resources policy. It made me realize that the people who write the laws and those of us who follow them can sometimes be very disconnected.

I remember that in a water law course we did a mock trial that had to do with the delisting of a stream based on a macroinvertebrate survey. Those who were enrolled in the law school for law degrees didn’t look at the case scientifically. To them, it was a trespassing case: “How did you get access to that stream?” Because, if you didn’t have access properly, then it makes all the surveys invalid. It was about the legality of entering the water, and that was eye-opening.

According to the Wildlife Leadership Academy (WLA) website, its mission is to “engage and empower high school age youth to become Conservation Ambassadors to ensure a sustained wildlife, fisheries and natural resource legacy for future generations.” As executive director of WLA, what does this mission mean to you?

It means finding the spark that folks have for conservation and lighting it. A blaze is a fire which lets them make change as conservation leaders in whatever communities they are in. That could be their home community and their school community, or their work community. We’re working with the aspects of nature to try and have a positive impact. WLA is a magical melting pot of rural Tioga County, inner-city Philadelphia, and everywhere in between. Our students come from 14 different states, with plenty of different experiences.

Why did you want to join WLA and assist in its cause?

I spent a long time in academia as I pursued my degrees and also did a lot of networking. When WLA was looking for a fisheries expert in 2019 to look at its aquatic curriculum, Gary Alt, a bear and deer biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, reached out to me. As the story goes, I said, “Gary, I’m just a graduate student. I’m not a fisheries expert. I’m not a professional. I’m not in the field yet,” and he said, “No, no, you study fish, and I study bear and deer, therefore you are the fish expert.”

And after that, I came on to look at the week of field school (the conservation-focused camp hosted by WLA) and its curriculum and see if there were any changes I would make. Everything was great, I made some minor tweaks here and there, but I fell in love with the program because it’s not just a one-and-done kind of thing. It’s not just a week of summer camp. There’s this continued engagement. That’s something you don’t see in most other programs. That caused me to stay on through the pandemic when we went virtual as the aquatic curriculum coordinator. Then, I visited all the field schools in person in 2022.

After that, I took a little bit of a career detour while I was wrapping up my PhD. There was a position to be filled at the Center for Quantitative Imaging at Penn State. They had an unexpected vacancy, and I happen to have the skill set that they needed from my PhD, where I could step in and run the industrial CT Scanners as part of a collaborative team to keep the center running. They hired me full time and I thought that that was going to be my new direction.

But that’s also when the leadership transition for director at WLA happened, and I got a call about it, and I haven’t looked back since.

At WLA, you also assist in curriculum development. What do you think are critical skills for students who are currently studying to be in the sustainability field? What advice would you give to someone trying to enter the field?

It’s the skills that we assume we have been taught as good human beings. It’s knowing when to ask for help. It’s listening skills. It’s communication skills. Those are harder to teach because we are far more set in our ways by the time we’re coming into our careers. We can teach anyone how to hold a bear cub. We can teach anybody how to take a deer out of a clover trap. You can teach anybody how to mark a fish or a turtle. But it’s about common sense. Independence. Being a fully-fledged adult.

And while employers are happy to help guide you, these are hard things to teach. Self-starting is hard to teach. The ability to look around a room and say, “What needs to be done?” and do it without being asked. Adaptability and flexibility. And it’s the work ethic but also knowing how to be balanced.

Learning by doing is important, too. You learn something because something happens that you didn’t expect. And how you take that moment and grow from it is important. It’s about being a self-leader, and leadership to me means growth from mistakes. We don’t necessarily grow when everything’s going well. But when something goes wrong, how do we take that? Take the lesson and grow. Either do better or do differently. That’s the process. You learn something because something happens that you weren’t expecting, and you figure out how to adapt.

Sustainability is no exception to the need for connections. Knowing people and what they’re researching can help people find their place. What advice would you give to a student who is struggling to make those key connections?

Ask somebody to make a connection for you. Go to conferences. Go where the people are. Whether it’s at a weekly birding meeting or a scientific conference or a landowners’ conference, go find those like-minded people and find connections.

If it’s your first time going, oftentimes there are mentorship programs where they connect you with somebody who has gone before, and it is their job to help introduce you to people. That can cause a sort of domino effect. If you do find maybe one face that you know, you get that first introduction, and they introduce you to somebody else, and it snowballs from there.

Everybody is always nice, in my experience. Everybody always wants to help others. And going as a student, starting as a student, is a perfect gateway because people are interested in you. “What are you studying? How did you get interested? What do you want to do with that?” So, take advantage of being in that role.

It’s an incredibly small world in the conservation space, which means there’s a high likelihood that somebody has worked with your professors. It’s a small network, and you’d be surprised. You want to be remembered in a good way, so that when somebody says, “You know, I need somebody to come out here and help me plant a thousand trees,” or, “I need somebody to help me run this campaign,” yours will be the name on the tip of their tongue. “You know what, I’ve got someone for you. Let me connect you.” And so those connections, those relationships, really go a long way.