Deana Beek
BENDER OF TWIGS INDUCTEE 2019
The department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics is the largest department on
the WSU Campus with about 100 people teaching (faculty, adjuncts, GTA’s) and more
than 3,000 students in our classes each semester. The department has three secretaries
on the third floor of Jabara Hall. I was the department chair during 1987-2015.
In 1994 we had a secretarial vacancy, and a number of people applied. Among them was a young woman, newly graduated from WSU with major in Dance. Her name was Deana, and we learned that she was an accomplished dancer. During the interview we realized that although dancing was not in the position’s requirements, she was a perfect candidate: she had a good knowledge of our campus and very good communication skills.
Within the first year we realized that Deana also was very skilled in learning new software in addition to performing very well in practically every other aspect of the job. A few years later, in spring 1998, we had a vacancy for the office manager, and without hesitation we promoted Deana to the supervisory position. I became her direct supervisor. Here’s an excerpt of my review a half-year later: “Over the past six months Deana has quietly and without visible difficulties assumed the management of our office. I am pleasantly surprised at the ease of her transfer from a secretary to the manager of a large office that serves over 45 faculty and lecturers, dozens of graduate students, and a very large number of undergraduate students. During this time she introduced a number of changes that improved the work of the office”. She got an “exceptional” rating from me for that year. And this rating has been repeated every year since.
For nearly 20 years in my assessment of her work, I constantly used words for high competence --dependable; highly efficient; great skills in nurturing, training new secretarial staff; excellent job in supervising others and dealing directly with some aspects of the program, etc. I still am wondering how she has managed consistently to maintain a very pleasant atmosphere in a department consisting of faculty (mathematicians, statisticians, physicists), lecturers, and graduate students—with varying cultural backgrounds and occasional idiosyncrasies; and, a great number of (sometimes noisy) undergraduates requesting assistance. But she did!
I’m certainly very grateful to her as my personal secretary for assistance in many aspects of my job: dealing directly with the university rules and regulations (red tape), hiring new secretarial staff (she has a much better understanding of the staff’s worth), and advising me in a variety of cases regarding students and staff who had to be dealt with in all those years.
During the past 25 years in addition to working hard, Deana got married (a year after getting the job), created a family, and raised a son who served in the military for several years (all of them in the war in Iraq). Now she is a proud grandmother. Deana is also a dog lover and has raised a number of beautiful dogs.
I can now confess that in all these years my greatest fear related to the department was that the administration would find out how fortunate we are and steal Deana…
All I can say in conclusion is that Deana Beek is a dear friend and one of the very best colleagues I have ever had in our university.
Buma Fridman
Professor of Mathematics
SME: SP/SRAP
Updated: 11/25/2019 SRAP