Hello! I’m Bethany. In my professional life I’ve helped hundreds of folks navigating career transitions, and I am committed to making the career journey supportive, inclusive, and affirming.

Currently, I manage the Science & Technology Policy Fellows program at the California Council on Science and Technology. One of my favorite parts of working on this one-year fellowship for 15 science and engineering PhDs is helping them make the leap to a fulfilling career beyond academia. You can see me give a workshop on interview skills for the National Science Policy Network Symposium for a sense of how I bring my career development lens to this role.

I have also provided career coaching services to professionals from all walks of life.  At the UC Davis Internship and Career Center, I was the senior career advisor for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars where I served a constituency of about 7,000 individuals.  providing one-on-one appointments, workshops, panels, site visits, and career fairs. I also liaised with regional employers, managed part-time staff, and collaborated with campus colleagues and stakeholders. You can watch the recordings of career workshops I led on this YouTube playlist. I am especially proud of launching a career development assistance award in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide financial support to graduate students doing unpaid internships, a particular area of inequity in career development. It was a challenge and a joy to hold space for advanced degree students and early career professionals from all walks of life as they designed their career paths. I’m pleased to have a strong track record of successful careers launched from my time in this role.

Teaching and training represent another through line in my professional life. I  received my PhD in U.S. History in 2015, and have taught more than 1,000 students, from first year community college students to PhD candidates in their final year of doctoral study. I taught career development courses for 25 graduate students at UC Davis twice a year. Before that, I taught American women’s history, U.S. history, and California history at UC Davis, and U.S. women’s history at Solano Community College. I have also created eLearning training courses for scientists  making the transition from academia to the biotech industry, and developed relationships with career center staff at higher education institutions to build potential partnerships. I design learning experiences that spark intellectual curiosity, encourage critical thinking, and create a community environment while meeting learning outcomes.

Writing has been been another cornerstone of my professional life. I researched wrote a dissertation called The Fruit of Her Fields: California Women in Commercial Horticulture, 1870-1915, where I analyzed the group of women fruit farm owners, a group of mostly white, unmarried and widowed women who rose to prominence on the twin waves of anti-Asian animosity and the women’s suffrage movement in the West. You can read my article in the Western Historical Quarterly about seed seller Theodosia Shepherd or read a post I wrote on the Rural Women’s Studies blog. Before graduate school, I was a reporter for the Santa Barbara News-Press, writing feature stories and breaking news. Most of those articles are paywalled, but you can read some of my clips here. I also told several personal stories at Shorts N Longs, a community storytelling event founded by Lisa Cantrell that I occasionally hosted. You can listen to me emcee the event, or tell a personal story here. Whatever the medium, I always strive to make my stories resonate with my audience.