Eloise Ogden/MDN Chennel Williams helps with the care of the red kangaroo and other animals as an intern at Roosevelt Park Zoo in Minot. From Jamaica, Williams is also a student at Minot State University.

A biology major at Minot State University, Chennel Williams would like to work with wildlife when she finishes her college years. Being an intern at Minot’s Roosevelt Park Zoo in Minot gives her the perfect job.

Learning about an internship program offered at Roosevelt Park Zoo early this year, Williams, of Kingston, Jamaica, applied for it and after an interview was immediately accepted.

“It seemed so quick and so fast. It literally really just fell in my lap but it’s such a great opportunity that I have,” she said.

“I help with animal husbandry. We feed and take care of the animals,” she said.

Williams shadows zookeeper Amanda Cone. “I help her out with the red pandas, the red kangaroos and the outreach animals,” Williams said.

She said the zoo’s outreach animals include Laura, a prairie dog, ferrets, a rabbit, hedgehog and chinchilla. “They go to schools or you might see them around the zoo. We have little events with them where we introduce them to the public for public knowledge,” she said. Laura, the prairie dog, was in a recent outreach event showing some of the people attending Military Appreciation Day at the zoo how she will eat small slivers of carrots.

Conservation Day at the zoo on July 15 is an upcoming event when Williams and other interns will have booths with different activities. Williams has some special activities planned with the red pandas that day.

Coming from Jamaica, Williams discovered the Minot zoo has inhabitants she’s never seen before.

She said the zoos in Jamaica do not have such a wide variety of animals as the Minot zoo. “We have lions, a couple primates, snakes, crocodiles, iguanas. We have a lot of animals that are native to the Caribbean or Jamaica,” she said.

When she first got to Minot about two years ago, Williams made her first visit to the zoo with friends. “I even have a picture with the gibbons that I still have from that time,” she said.

She had never seen a kangaroo or a red panda before. “A lot of the animals they have I’ve never seen prior to coming here. It was really fun for me,” she said.”

Williams, who will be a junior at MSU in the fall, and is from Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, said of her homeland: “A lot of American tourists go there for their vacations and a lot of Jamaicans come to the United States.” She said many who visit the United States come here to visit family members and also to see what another country is like. “The first country they think of is ‘let’s go to America,’ “ she said.

Initially, Williams was considering other colleges when making plans for her future.

“I wanted to further my education but I didn’t want to go to one of the colleges back home,” she said. She said she wanted to leave Jamaica so she would have more experiences.

She looked at colleges in Florida because she has family there and colleges in New Jersey. She was accepted by a New Jersey college and received a scholarship but it didn’t cover enough of the costs.

As it got closer to summer, she said she realized she needed to get the ball rolling so she would know she would definitely be going to college in the fall. “I literally Googled the cheapest in the United States and Minot popped up. It was one of the cheapest,” she said.

She said when she was looking at colleges initially she said she wanted a college with some history and something more than 100 years old. She said her mother wanted her to go to a smaller college. “Because I’m her only child she didn’t want me getting lost in a big school and I wanted something affordable so Minot fit all of that,” she said.

Williams arrived in Minot in August 2015 to attend MSU. She has always been planning to major in biology, wildlife biology or zoology. She plans to remain at Minot State to graduate in 2019.

Her internship with the zoo concludes at the end of the summer. She also is a resident assistant on the college campus and will continue that work. “But definitely next summer I would love to come back here (to the zoo),” she said.

For her future plans Williams said she has looked into becoming a zoo veterinarian. “I’m still on the fence if I want to go to vet school or not but I definitely know I want to go to grad school and get my master’s either in wildlife conservation or maybe even zoology or wildlife biology. I know that I definitely want to work with wildlife. That has always intriqued me since I was about 11. That’s where my heart is,” she said.

(Prairie Profile is a weekly feature profiling interesting people in our region. We welcome suggestions from our readers. Call Editor Mike Sasser at 857-1959 or Regional Editor Eloise Ogden at 857-1944. Either can be reached at 1-800-735-3229. You also can send e-mail suggestions to msasser@minotdailynews.com.