We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Schein. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.
Jason, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?
Looking back, it’s hard to find things they didn’t do right. Both were highly educated, believed in education, and expected us to take education seriously. Both were trained as scientists, but eventually left that field to pursue other interests. They ended up working together at the car dealerships that my mother owned, learning the ins and outs of that industry from the ground up. The car business is one that is heavily dominated by families – dealerships are so often passed down from one generation to the next, or among sons. From the time I was young until the time I left for college, any time I visited the dealerships, employees there often asked if I was going to take over one day. I was not interested in that, and my parents never once expected or even encouraged me or my brothers to pursue it. They only ever encouraged us to pursue our passions, and I think that we’ve all benefited enormously from that. I certainly did. We all now have pretty awesome jobs and lives.
My parents also always actively encouraged our interests. My father took my brothers and I on day trips to historic sites, museums, camping and canoe trips, and road trips to explore new places. He also took us on weeks-long trips out west, giving us the opportunity to see and experience new places and cultures. Thanks to my mom’s business, we also got to go on some pretty amazing trips overseas. There are few things more important, more eye-opening, than traveling, especially for a young person.
I was a child of the 80s and early 90s, and everything that came with that. We were latchkey kids – so often at home alone while our parents worked their tails off. We saw how hard they worked, how they reinvented themselves in their careers, and we learned resilience and the value of hard work from them. We also benefited in a lot of ways from them being away so much. I know it’s in vogue now to lament being left alone by our boomer parents, but that too taught us to be resilient. To be independent. It allowed us to be bored – an undervalued state that builds creativity – and how to “fix” our boredom on our own. It encouraged us to explore and be outside more, to be active, physically and mentally. I’m not sure kids know how to be bored anymore, or even if they experience it, with their heads constantly buried in their screens.
Jason, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
A lot of paleontologists will tell you that they went through a dinosaur phase and just never grew out of it. That certainly is true for me, but that’s the short version of the story I often tell. There’s a lot more to it.
When I was a kid I always wanted to be an explorer. To visit places no one has ever been before. I was entranced by stories of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions, Alexander von Humboldt, and Patrick MacKenzie. I loved going anywhere that few people had been before, where I could easily imagine that I was the first person to see and experience that place. At some point, though, as you get older, you realize that unless you’re going to be one of a couple dozen astronauts, or even fewer people to visit the bottom of the oceans, there really are no more truly wild, unexplored places left on the planet.
Among the many day trips my dad took my brothers and I on when I was a kid was to collect fossils. I always loved the adventure of going to new places and finding these amazing artifacts of ancient life. It’s an incredible thrill when you find something, and realize that you’re not just the first person to ever see that object. You’re the first living thing to interact with that organism since it was alive, 150 MILLION years ago (or whatever it may be for a particular fossil). Finding fossils gave me that visceral, deeply personal thrill of being the first. I may not be the first person to visit that site, but I’m the first person to interact with that animal since it was alive. I may not be an explorer of places, but I’m an explorer of ecosystems back in time. I still get that thrill, even when we may find hundreds of fossils each day on our expeditions.
I was already in love with fossil hunting and paleontology when my dad took my brother and I on our first road trip out west. It was the summer when I was 9 years old, and I instantly fell deeply and madly in love with everything about the West. The cultures, landscapes, ecosystems, and especially the mountains. I knew that many of the best fossil-hunting grounds in the world were there, so it was a match of my two greatest loves made in heaven. I had to know more and more all the time. So, I studied geology in college, always with an eye on paleontology.
I moved to Philadelphia from the south to get my Ph.D. in paleontology and had some incredible experiences on expeditions to Patagonian Argentina to work on one of the largest dinosaurs ever known to walk the earth. I loved the brutally hard, hands-on, physical and mental work that it took to get those bones out of the ground in that stunningly beautiful remote locale. I loved the adventure and the never ending thrills of field work. I loved the craziness of the unpredictable weather, the wildlife, and everything else nature had to throw at us. The tougher the conditions, the more I loved it.
The Ph.D. didn’t work out, but I was lucky enough to get a job at the New Jersey State Museum. It was my dream job for a time, and as part of it I accompanied my boss in 2010 to southern Montana on his regular summer expedition. He had been visiting this area to do fieldwork since the 1960s, but obviously he was getting on in age and told me that he was turning the program over to me. The program at the time was quite small, consisting primarily of just a few of his friends and acquaintances, and lasting only a couple of weeks. As soon as I got out to the beautiful, little town of Red Lodge, Montana, and to the amazing, historic camp at the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association, and experienced the landscape and the fossil hunting in the nearby Bighorn Basin, I knew that there was so much more potential. I knew right away that so many more people would love to have this same experience, even if just for a week. These were lean years so I also knew that the state of New Jersey was not going to continue to let us go out there if we couldn’t at least break even and I knew that the State Museum desperately needed money. So I took that program and ran with it. I built it up 30 to 50% each year in terms of number of participants and revenue, and with an enormous amount of help from friends and colleagues, turned it into a huge and growing success. Eventually though, it came to a point where limitations told me it was time to move on and make the program even bigger than it ever could be under the state. So the first moment I could, I left and started my own organization: the Bighorn Basin Paleontological Institute (now Elevation Science Institute for Natural History Exploration).
Elevation Science is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to inspiring people of all ages and backgrounds to passionately explore and engage with our planet and its vast natural treasures by creating transformative educational experiences in paleontology, natural history, and scientific research. Our programming is quite diverse and growing all the time, but our primary program remains our summer paleontology field program, which now hosts hundreds of people from around the country and the world to help us find and excavate 150 million year old dinosaur remains.
I’m so proud of what our small but talented and dedicated team has accomplished in just the few years we’ve been open – we just celebrated our 6th anniversary! I can truly and honestly say, with utmost humility, that we aren’t just providing people with awesome experiences and bucket-list trips, but we have, in so many different ways, changed people’s lives. From one woman who discovered the desire to pursue a whole new career while on an expedition (and later became a board member!), to another who found a new confidence and passion after leaving a life that didn’t support her dreams, to a retiree who told me he thinks our program has added years to his life, and to the Make-A-Wish kids we’ve hosted with their families, we are creating deeply meaningful experiences that have changed so many peoples’ lives in ways so much more profound than I could have ever predicted.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
Our first field season in 2017 only had 28 people sign up. In comparison, we now usually host about 150 over the summer.. It was far fewer than I expected, and not even close to financially sustainable. I mistakenly believed that February would be a fine time to launch for summer sign ups, but I was wrong. Between February 20th, when we opened I skipped most of the payrolls for myself, and, even worse, I realized I couldn’t afford staff that first summer. The organization was saved by loyal, hard working friends and colleagues from my previous program who volunteered because they believed in what the organization could be. I remember driving home at the end of that summer season, excited about how things had gone that first summer, but also being absolutely terrified of the months to come. How in the world could I keep this going until spring when I expected people to start signing up again? With a family at home, how could I even go the next few months without getting paid??
Just a couple of weeks later I received an envelope that contained a check for over $52,000. It was for a grant proposal I’d written back in the spring, but it might as well have been a winning lottery ticket. I’d never before seen, much less held, a check for that much money. Shortly after that, I received some donations from participants and friends, congratulating us on getting through our first season. Then, it was only a few weeks later that fall that people started signing up for the next summer – earlier than I ever could have imagined. It was quite some time before I could pay myself regularly, much less an actual salary, but that grant, those early sign-ups, and those amazing supporters showed me that everything was going to be okay. And it was. Things have only gotten better and better since then.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
This one is simple. Word of mouth. Over the years we have spent very little on advertising and marketing. Many people sign up for an expedition thinking this is a once in a lifetime experience, and, honestly, that is how we used to market it. But we had to change that because so many people come back year after year. It was our amazing participants who taught us: yes, it is life changing, but why limit it to once in a lifetime? This summer about 50% of our participants will have joined us at least once before, and that number increases every year. Many of those people bring their friends and family. We now have so many parents that come with their teenage and/or adult children, but also sisters, friends groups, retired buddies who grew up together, and so much more. In fact, I’m proud to say that every year we have been able to expand our programs, and in large part that has been a product of support from our repeat participants, and making more room for new people to join the discovery.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ElevationScience.org
- Instagram: @ElevationScience
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ElevationScience
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elevation-science/
- Other: Tiktok: ElevationScience
Image Credits
All pictures are my own.