“I find that the main challenge is in educating and influencing the attitudes of younger Singaporeans to be more aware and interested in nature and the importance of conservation, says How Choon Beng, Senior Outreach Officer

Alan Tan is a horticulturist and Assistant Director at NParks, and he says that “NParks is an option that I would highly recommend to fresh graduates who aspire to a great career in an organization that offers them a wide and interesting scope of work, many opportunities to grow and develop themselves, and also enables them to appreciate the beauty of plants and nature at the same time.”

An Arborist (or tree surgeon) is a professional who practices arboriculture, which is the management and maintenance of trees. At NParks, Arborists help to take care of the 1.3 million trees that are planted in Singapore. We are divided into zones, and I’m in the West zone, so I ensure that all the planted trees in the West zone are healthy and free of diseases and pests. We also liase with external agencies when there are road works or construction going on, in the event that there are trees which need to be cleared or protected.

I chose to study landscape architecture as it is very fluid and gives me a lot of scope to work in because of the range of projects that we have. I received a scholarship from NParks to study landscape architecture at the University of Melbourne, and I graduated in August last year. So I’ve been working as a Landscape Architect at NParks for 8 months now.