Rachel Beckham - French
Alumni Spotlight
Rachel Beckham graduated from SSU in 2019 with a BA in French.
1. Tell us about your studies at SSU.
I came to SSU as a transfer student to study Biology. Fate would have it that all the required classes for my major were full, and so I signed up for French 201. I had taken French classes in high school and at my junior college but hadn’t put much thought into continuing at SSU. After taking French 202, I decided to add a French minor and later switched to a double major.
2. When you were at SSU, did you have any idea of what you would do after graduation?
It changed a bit. I had started at SSU being a bio major where I was on a pre-med route and realized halfway through my time at SSU that I wasn’t happy with that trajectory. While being a student assistant at the library, I realized that I enjoyed working in libraries more than doing biology. Library school seemed like a better next step.
3. How did your studies or activities at SSU influence your future job opportunities/choices?
As stated before, I was a student assistant at the SSU Library. Working in Special Collections/University Archives allowed me to work with documents and materials that showed Sonoma County history. Some were wonderful (fun fact– Women’s History Month started in SoCo) while others were a little sad (ex: transcribing Japanese Internment camp letters from SoCo residents). This cemented the idea that I would want to work with cultural heritage in some respect in the future. My hobbies also include handicrafts such as quilting and crochet and I would eventually like to make that part of my career.
In graduate school, I applied for library jobs that involved language because I wanted to actually use the language that I had spent 4 years practicing. Language was quite important for a friend and I to the point that we had created a metadata thesaurus for language learning applications as a major class project. At the time, it didn’t seem like much because we just wanted to share what we enjoyed and relate it to libraries.
4. Tell us about your trajectory after SSU.
Immediately after SSU, I went to the University of Washington where I received my Master of Library and Information Science in 2021. From there, I joined my husband in Indiana, where I currently work for Indiana University Libraries. Outside my job, I work with the Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Arts Museum as a member of their board of directors.
5. How has your French major helped you in your career?
To be completely honest, knowing French did help me get a job in graduate school because I was cataloging foreign language materials.
Libraries (despite the current book bans and other unsavory aspects) work with a multitude of patrons and require that one must be curious about others and have some level of cultural competency. Being a French major helped with this curiosity because we were learning about all the francophone, not just well-known francophone areas.
Knowing a language also gave me a different perspective when it came to the data aspects of my job. Metadata seemed like a bunch of a number of fields of gibberish at first until I ended up realizing that it is a language used to describe our collections. Now I know how to use our programs to better explain data trends.
6. How did you find your various positions (if not covered above)?
Pure dumb luck. I wish that I were kidding and said that it was all hard work and talent…it was none of that. I had the required qualifications and was there at the right place and time.
7. What is working in your job (or jobs) like? What challenges or benefits have you found?
It has its ups and downs like any job. Most days are spreadsheet heavy, where I am doing searches so that we keep our collections accurate to ensure that future generations of patrons can enjoy the materials. With report season, I have been able to do some cool data wrangling to see the overall trends of how much we have added to the physical collection and show how COVID changed our collecting habits.
In terms of benefits, I have learned how to use programs that were not available at either SSU or UW. This will be helpful for wherever I end up in the future. I’ve also gotten to gain experience being on our staff council. As for challenges, I didn’t realize how much bureaucracy there is in academia. It’s one thing to work on projects as a student assistant, but creating projects or trying to make changes as staff is a bit more difficult.
9. What advice do you have for current students?
Don’t be afraid of failure and don’t continue to do something that makes you miserable just because it makes someone else happy. Get involved, because that is how you get to know people (especially at SSU) and you can learn that you really like something that you never expected.
10. What do you see yourself doing five or ten years from now?
I would like to have the chance to travel outside the U.S. I was working multiple jobs in undergrad and the pandemic hit my first year of grad school, so I didn’t have the time or money to go anywhere. At that point in my career, I would like to be somewhat settled. I don’t know if I want to be tenured in five years, but maybe in ten years. I know that many of those plans seem vague, but I’m trying to keep an open mind about change, since a lot can happen in five years.