Becoming an ethologist?

[Sominare]

I'm a couple years out of high school and am ready to head towards a real career. Step by step (even the smallest ones) would be helpful. Where exactly do I start? I'm not 100% sure an ethologist is where I want to end up, but somewhere in the zoology area. Any serious help would be wonderful.

[tigerb]

First, if you are a couple years out of highschool, how much college do you have? If you don't have any, then you need to get some. My first suggestion is to find the sort of research that you want to do then find out who's doing that sort of research. For instance, I'm interested in coparative cognition, and there are only so many people in the US actually doing comparative cognition studies on the level that I am actually interested in. Then contact those people and find out if they have any programs for undergrads, are they willing to take undergrads into their labs, etc. The program they are in will be the program you follow.If you have a Bachelors, then you must do the above, but either on a Master's (not really worth the paper it's written on) or a PhD level (really not worth the paper it's written on, but what's one to do). You might need to take supplemental classes in the meantime. For instance, my undergrad major was in primates, but my area of interest has led me to people in psychology department. So, I needed to take psychology classes (in my case, I took them on the masters level) before it was appropriate for me to enter a PhD program.