10/23/2026
Happy ! Here from Hannah Sarvasy, an NYC Alum from 2004-2005!
What are some life skills you learned at NYC, and how did they impact your personal growth?
I learned a huge amount from working at NYC. The experience took me out of myself. I used to tell people I moved out of my self-centered, introspective mode from university and became totally focused on learning new technical skills, crew building, and the immediate challenges of living and working hard in the wilderness. I keep the knowledge of the amazing physical feats we accomplished, and the leadership skills I gained, in my mental back pocket, and that knowledge continues to give me quiet confidence in every job I do and in confronting every new challenge. What a gift from NYC!
What career or meaningful thing are you pursuing now?
I am a field linguist. I have worked with the last speakers of the Kim and Born languages in remote fishing villages in Sierra Leone, and since 2011, I have been working closely with Nungon-speaking communities in remote villages in Papua New Guinea. I wrote a grammar of their language for my PhD. I lived for many months in these communities to learn their languages, and was able to do a lot of traditional farming and manual labor during that period, too, using skills developed at NYC and beyond! I am passionate about getting information about child development and language use to young parents who speak Indigenous languages around the world, so they don’t feel like they have to speak some foreign language to their kids for them to succeed in life.
What does NYC mean to you?
NYC was the first of multiple conservation corps I worked for in my twenties. The others were year-round programs, where staff and corpsmembers commuted into work every morning, and didn’t involve overnight spikes (except for fires support with the CCC). I am so grateful to have had the NYC experience, which is still so vivid in me and which I’ve often felt served as the foundation for pretty much everything else I do, both in work and in life. NYC epitomizes the best of the American West to me.
