Alumni Profile: Carly Taylor, Cold Spring, KY

From intern to full-time role at the Natural History Institute

Stanford alumna Carly Taylor talks about how an internship through the Bill Lane Center led to her current full-time role at the Natural History Institute.

By Sofia Scekic

Carly Taylor, ’23, was planning to spend the year after she graduated from Stanford teaching English through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF), which is run by the French Embassy. That is, until she moved to Prescott, Ariz. for her Bill Lane Center-sponsored internship at the Natural History Institute (NHI) during the summer of 2023. 

Interning at the NHI, Taylor said, “made me realize that I was not that excited about my own view and plans that I had for myself.” She has since scrapped her plans of moving to France and now works as the institute’s first communications coordinator.

Taylor got her start at the NHI as a media arts intern in June 2023, joining a cohort of 18 other Stanford students and recent graduates who were placed at organizations across the West by the Bill Lane Center. The Center sponsors student interns at nearly 20 organizations in the American West each summer, to work in fields broadly encompassing the areas of conservation, policy, history and community engagement. 

At Stanford, Taylor explored a wide variety of subjects and gained experience in several different areas through internships, academic programs and involvement with numerous student organizations. A Kentucky native, she came into Stanford from the Gatton Academy of Math and Science with an interest in computer science and engineering. She expected to major in a STEM field, but after participating in Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program, she felt more drawn to the humanities and ultimately majored in Comparative Literature. 

“I think I was more concerned about employability in high school, but when I got to Stanford, I was just overwhelmed by all the different possibilities and opportunities,” Taylor said. “I made the choice to study what really authentically interested me at the time and not be too concerned about what career I would end up in.” 

While studying abroad at Oxford during her junior year, she was searching through Stanford’s SOLO platform for a summer internship that would keep her busy and out of her parent’s house in Kentucky before she moved to France for TAPIF the following fall.

“Each year at Stanford, I had my eye on the Bill Lane Center internships because they always had something that sounded very interesting to me,” Taylor explained. 

“I didn’t know the American West very well at all before coming to Stanford,” she continued. “I’d never been West of the Mississippi before I moved to California. I was definitely interested in spending a summer somewhere that I hadn’t been in the West.”

The job description for the media arts intern at the NHI appealed to her, she said, because it sounded like a fun opportunity to get paid to create video and photo content for a small organization — something that can be difficult to find.

“I was also drawn to the institute’s interdisciplinary mission,” Taylor said. “Because still, at the end of five years at Stanford, I felt like I had kind of bounced all over in terms of my academic interests.”

Taylor described the institute as a ‘do-seum’ rather than a museum, explaining that their goal is to get visitors out into nature to do things, not just into their building to look at exhibitions. She had volunteered at a natural history museum in Cincinnati, Ohio in high school but appreciated the NHI’s differing emphasis on getting people outside.

“What we’re doing is teaching people to see things in their context, in the natural world,” Taylor said. “That often involves learning, outside, learning in the field and taking people to places.”

The institute is housed in a building in downtown Prescott, where visitors can visit a gallery, herbarium and lab. The NHI hosts several events each month in their event space, which are all live streamed on YouTube. The rest of the institute’s programming, Taylor said, revolves around getting participants outside: outdoor workshops, guided hikes and multi-day naturalist field camps are all examples of past events that the institute has held. Many of those outdoor events complement an in-house event like an artist talk.

In the middle of Taylor’s summer internship, she took the initiative to approach the NHI’s Executive Director Bob Ellis (who was her internship supervisor) about what it might look like for her to continue in a full-time role after her internship ended.

“I came up to [Ellis] and was like, I think there’s space in this organization for me to continue being here, and here’s what I think it could look like,” Taylor explained. “And we just went from there.” 

‘Communications Coordinator’ is the name Taylor came up with for the collection of things that she had been doing in her internship and also the areas of need that she had identified within the organization. She primarily works in social media and digital outreach and has been in charge of expanding the institute’s online presence to reach new audiences.

In addition to immediately feeling welcomed and valued at the institution, Taylor said she fell in love with Prescott shortly after moving there, which also encouraged her to pursue a full-time position. She’d spent summers in San Francisco and Asheville, N.C., and several quarters abroad as an undergraduate. Although she enjoyed her time in those locations, she had never felt a long-term connection with a place — until she moved to Prescott.

“Natural history was a way for me to really connect with [Prescott] and fall in love with it,” she said. “Being here and working in this place made me see the value of developing a long-term connection with a place.” 

At the beginning of her internship, she became interested in phenology, or the study of cycles in nature and how things change seasonally. Although she arrived in Prescott during the summer, which she described as simultaneously the best and worst time of the year to be there, she said she quickly had a “very deep desire” to stay in Prescott through one full seasonal cycle. 

“Now, I hope to see it for many more cycles,” she said.

This year, Taylor had the opportunity to interview current Stanford students who had applied for the Bill Lane Center’s summer internship with the NHI. She said it was interesting to be on the other side of the hiring process just one year later but called it nerve-wracking to convince students to choose an internship at the institute over the plethora of other opportunities they may have. 

She called her interview last year with Ellis and Jennie Tuttone, the NHI's Program Director, “one of the least scary and most fun” that she has done. She said it was clear that they were excited by the possibility of welcoming her to the team as an intern and allowing her to contribute to the institute. 

“My advice would be to look for that, seek out that feeling in the people you’re talking to from an organization and from the organizations that you want to work with,” Taylor said. “Because the people who you work with — that’s everything.”