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, administering the program’s training, placement, and ongoing professional development, while managing the full lifecycle of the application review and selection process. One of my favorite parts of working on this immersive fellowship for 15 science and engineering PhDs is seeing how much folks grow after one-year in state government, and how many of them go on to fulfilling careers in science policy. 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.

In the past, I  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 and collaborated with faculty, administrators, and other university 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. It was a challenge and a joy to support 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. I am currently working on a co-authored book chapter in an edited collection on the Histories and Futures of Career Diversity that will come out … someday (hopefully).

Teaching and training represent another through line in my professional life. I  received my PhD in U.S. History from UC Davis, 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 history courses at Solano Community College, Napa Valley College, and UC Davis.  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 immigration 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.

In a previous life, I was a reporter for the Santa Barbara News-Press, writing feature stories and occasional breaking news. Most of those articles are paywalled, but you can read some of my clips here. I also told several personal stories on stage 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.