So, I don’t know exactly how it works now but when I was a student in Oly, the US Forest Service could hire students non-competitively. I went to the Olympic National Forest HQ and asked about student employment. They set me up on contracts doing fish surveys and literature research. It was enough to pay for school, it gave me some college credit for the job experience, and I built a network to grow from over the years. Best luck and thank you for your interest in ecology.