What is your job title on campus? 

I’m the user experience and assessment librarian [at Reeves Library].

What does your position usually entail?

My job is mostly about making Reeves Library a space that students want to come to and making it a welcoming environment. I really couldn’t do that without the 65 student workers that I manage. That takes up the bulk of my job, but I work really closely with all of them to help them grow their skills and give them real-life work experience. I also do a lot of things like library orientation and collaborate with other campus groups to program events. So the bulk of my responsibilities are working with people and doing things behind the scenes that nobody really sees in-house. 

What are some of the unique challenges that come with your position? 

There’s a lot of student workers to manage, so that tends to take a lot of coordination. It’s also the most rewarding thing that I do. Another challenge is meeting the diverse needs of our campus and library staff since we have to work with everybody on different levels. We work with the community, students, faculty, and staff, and they all often have different expectations of what a library is and how a library serves them.

What are your favorite aspects of working in your position? 

It’s definitely getting to connect with people. It’s the reason that I do what I do, and why I really enjoy being a librarian. Obviously, the student workers are definitely my favorite part of the job, helping them, mentoring them, and getting them to a space where they can grow and help the community as well is especially fulfilling. I think they’re really essential in what makes the library a dynamic and welcoming space, and I really love to work with them a lot to get there. My second favorite thing is collaborating on programming, especially things that spark creativity and conversation. Partnering and brainstorming with campus clubs and faculty to create events is really meaningful to me, especially because I get to see the way our campus community can come together. 

What made you decide to work at Moravian? 

I’m a Moravian alum, class of 2015, so coming back here kind of felt a bit like coming home. I loved Bethlehem, and I loved the area, but really it was the people that I was coming back to, more than the university itself. A lot of my mentors in college are still either here or have just recently left, like Janet Ohls, who was the director when I started and when I was a student worker at Reeves. She helped me kind of pick my career path and decide to be a librarian and worked with me a lot when I interned here. Getting the opportunity to come back and work with her in a different way, as a professional versus a student, was really a draw for me. I was also excited to work with Dr. Jane Berger, who was my advisor when I was a history major, so getting to come back and do things like work with Women and Gender Sexuality studies with Jane and do some community outreach has been great. There’s also Dr. Stacy Zaremba [Psychology], who I now co-advise the Gender Equity Club with. I had looked to these people as mentors, and now coming back and being able to work with them as a peer is really powerful, and to be that type of person for students is something that I strive for.

What’s an interesting fact about yourself that most people don’t know?

I am freakishly good at winning raffles, like, I think it should be studied honestly. I had it on my resume for a while as a skill, and it was a great conversation starter. I won a blanket from a pecan company with a year’s worth of pecans, and I have a bunch of weird things in my apartment from raffles and giveaways. If you point to it, that probably was a raffle prize.

What do you do in your free time? 

I am a big nerd. If you couldn’t tell by me being a librarian, I think we’re supposed to be nerds. I like Magic The Gathering, which is a more recent hobby. I just like to collect the cards, instead of playing the game. I do embroidery, and I craft a lot to unwind. I really like video games, and often deep dive into them. I like storylines, so that tends to be where I go in a video game, something that can give me a story and a rabbit hole I could jump into. I also spend a lot of time with my dog. That’s not really necessarily a hobby, but that’s my de-stressor. My dog likes to burrow into blankets, so we’ll just, like, cuddle and watch TV and kind of just relax.