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It took an Oregon State University recruiter wielding a two-by-four to change Kevin Harry‘s life.

The recruiter, from , visited Harry and the other 10 people in his senior class last year while Harry was a student at Mapleton High School.

When the man came, all Harry knew was that he wanted to do “something outdoors” with his life, perhaps forest engineering or something else with a general forestry bent, he said.

But that changed when the recruiter held up about a foot and a half of wood board and told Harry something he had never heard before.

“He said ‘this is how much wood a person uses every day,’ and I was hooked,” Harry said. “There’s wood in gum, in toothpaste. It got me really excited. I thought ‘this looks really, really fun.'”

Harry, 19, started the school’s new program in its first semester this fall.

Run out of the College of Forestry, the renewable materials degree evolved out of of OSU’s wood science program, which has been updated and altered into the new degree at the suggestion of an industry that’s growing despite the poor economy, said Tom McLain, a professor and head of the new department.

“We’ve been beaten about the head and shoulders for a number of years now by employers for not producing enough graduates,” McLain said. “The industry wanted more of a balance between the business and technical sides of renewable materials, so we pretty much scrapped our entire curricula and started over.”

Wood science used to be much more technically focused, with graduates generally going into technical support, manufacturing, lumber firms and plywood makers, McLain said.

But the renewable materials marketplace in Oregon has grown a lot more diverse since that program originally started, he said.

“The industry has changed, consolidated and become more efficient,” McLain said. “Our students are looking for jobs in areas we never would have thought of before. There’s a lot more international trade, architectural, consumer goods and raw materials work now.”

When he was looking at a career in forest engineering, Harry said he worried about finding a job.

“It’s just a pretty crowded area of forestry science,” he said. “But when the recruiter came and talked about opportunities in renewable materials, he told us there are more jobs than there are people to fill them.”

The wood science program produced eight to 12 graduates per year, and McLain said he couldn’t think of a single student that didn’t quickly find work after leaving OSU.

The new program is designed to produce 15 to 20 graduates a year, but even that might not fill the demand, McLain said.

“The industry folks say that’s probably a good start, but they’re worried about drop off in the next five years when their older, more experienced workers are expected to retire,” McLain said.

When the economy improves, many industries expect mass retirement of baby boomer-aged workers. In the renewable materials sector, that could represent up to 60 percent of the highly skilled workforce, McLain said.

OSU students from the new program will be able to fill some of that demand – and will easily be able to move between business and technical aspects of their jobs, McLain said.

“The employers told us they could no longer afford to have employees with just a technical or just a business focus,” McLain said. “They need people that can switch between both, especially considering many of these businesses are small to medium sized.”

Graduates from the bachelors of science program generally earn between $45,000 and $60,000 a year – and they get six months of practical work experience as part of their degree requirements, McLain said.

Harry said he’s thrilled that there are so many job opportunities out there already and that the degree will likely let him find a job in rural Oregon, where his family has been involved in the logging industry for at least three generations.

“I don’t want to stop at a bachelor’s degree, though, I want to go all the way to get my Ph.D.,” Harry said. “This is my first semester, but I’m really looking forward to the harder stuff coming up. There are so many interesting things to study.”