Meet Andrus Scholar Carter Hilton

It's hard to find many students as engaged on campus as environmental studies senior Carter Hilton. He is a percussionist in the Blue Thunder Marching Band, a staff member at the Cycle Learning Center and this summer he joined six other students as a 2025 Andrus Scholar.

The Andrus Scholars program supports students working in paid summer internships with regional environmental organizations. Hilton worked with the Bureau of Land Management on projects right outside Boise.

"I did a little of everything with the BLM," he said. "My first week was doing stream flow testing, then I shifted to more botany work." The end of the summer brought him to the site of the Range Fire, which burned the sagebrush steppe to the southeast of Boise in early August 2025.

This wasn't Hilton's first experience with field work. He was a volunteer in Virginia's Youth Conservation Corps before coming to Boise State.

"We spent three weeks doing trail work in James River State Park," Hilton said. "We got to learn from a park ranger. It was a blast."

Those early experiences with conservation work and an appreciation for Idaho's wilderness brought him to Boise State in 2022, where he quickly decided to major in environmental studies and minor in climate studies.

Throughout his education in the School of the Environment, Hilton has remained engaged in field work. One service learning course took him to the Hull's Gulch area in the Boise foothills, where he supported Ridge to Rivers efforts to fight erosion.

"You're learning all the things in the books and you're doing all the lessons, but in service learning you actually go out and do it," Hilton said.

The experiences have helped him connect the theory he learns in the classroom with real-world use cases, and it will serve him in a conservation career after graduation. He hasn't cemented his plans for the future yet, but he's excited about any kind of work that connects him with the wilderness.

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