By Jefferson Beavers, communication specialist, Department of English
Two brand-new Fresno State alumni have begun their summers with full-time jobs that were secured and started months before finishing their undergraduate studies in the English Department.
Literature major Beth Contreras started working as a legal assistant for the Fresno County Public Defender’s office in April, and creative writing major Nayeli Guerrero started working as an augmentation aide for the Fresno Unified School District in March.
Contreras and Guerrero are examples of English majors imagining and pursuing their own career paths while completing their bachelor’s degrees. Both new alumni credit their study of literature and writing for broadening their understanding of what’s possible for life after college.
They join other English alumni who have carved unexpected paths to meaningful careers, including a number who work in libraries and many other professional spaces in addition to teaching and publishing.
Contreras, 21, was born and raised in the Tulare County city of Visalia, 50 miles south of Fresno. In 2019, she graduated from El Diamante High School. On May 19, she graduated cum laude from Fresno State with a 3.53 GPA, earning a double bachelor’s degree in English literature and sociology. She made the president’s list or dean’s list in four of her eight semesters on campus.
In her time at Fresno State, Contreras said she was most proud of herself for working more than part-time — “It was a feat in itself” — while holding up honors status in the classroom. She said presenting at the Undergraduate Conference on Multiethnic Literatures of the Americas also felt rewarding.
Her paper, “The Decolonial Poetics of Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Salvage the Bones,’” was part of a panel entitled “Resistant Poetics.” She researched and wrote the paper as part of Dr. Sean A. Gordon’s topics course on the Plantationocene, which examined the devastating global transformations perpetuated by plantation systems across centuries.
“The opportunity to present at UCMLA was a phenomenal experience for me, to engage with an audience and the scholarly work of my peers,” she said.
At the Fresno County Public Defender’s office, Conteras’s daily responsibilities include maintaining the calendars and schedules for two attorneys who are assigned as public defenders to the Fresno County Superior Court’s felony department.
Alongside more than a dozen fellow legal assistants, Contreras files and keeps track of hundreds of cases in physical files. She said the work involves a lot of attention to detail, a high level of organization, and technical writing. She credits her campus experiences as a student assistant in the graduate admissions office and as a member of Fresno State’s Mock Trial Team as keys to her professional training.
In the future, after working for several years in her legal assistant job, Contreras plans to apply to the Master of Library and Information Science graduate program at UCLA and then to law school, with the hope of becoming a law librarian. She hopes to live somewhere new while earning her postgraduate degrees, and then return to the Central Valley to put what she has learned to work for her local communities.
“Every inch of text that I read and discussed was more than just a grade,” Conteras said of her time as an English major at Fresno State. “Self-advocacy was most important for me while studying writing and literature. I had to find my niche in the study. What do you love to do? Get more specific. Is it a type of study, a certain style, a specific area? After you know what it is, you have to put yourself in those spaces that best serve you.”
Guerrero, 22, grew up in the Merced County town of Gustine, 90 miles northeast of Fresno. In 2019, she graduated from Gustine High School. On May 19, she graduated magna cum laude from Fresno State with a 3.79 GPA, earning a bachelor’s degree in creative writing with a minor in Italian studies. She made the president’s list or dean’s list in seven of her eight semesters on campus.
In her time at Fresno State, Guerrero said she was most proud to serve on the editorial board for the Young Writers’ Conference — working alongside her peers to produce the conference journal and selecting the writing awards. She also enjoyed “getting out of [her] shell” and performing at the city’s annual Rogue Festival, reading poetry as part of the Fresno Writers Live shows, which this year included students from Prof. Brynn Saito’s senior seminar class.
Her poems were all about family life in the town of Moyahua in Zacatecas, Mexico. The pieces were entitled “Mezquituta,” “Las Fiestas de Moyahua,” “Un Atardecer en México,” “América’s Ghostwriters,” and “Ode to Cosmo, the Bombay.”
“Participating in Rogue Fest allowed me to present some poetry in honor of my culture, and I felt super great about it,” she said.
At Fresno Unified, Guerrero’s daily responsibilities include supporting four teachers in their 5th and 6th grade classrooms. Each day is packed and can be very different, and it may include printing-out learning materials, aiding in class instruction, making rounds in the classroom as an extra helping hand, grading student work, and one-on-one tutoring.
Guerrero said she feels “ecstatic to be part of a team that strives to be the very best we can be every day.” As an educator, getting her foot in the door of a classroom before graduation and gaining first-hand experience working with students and teachers has started to open up the possibilities for what kind of career she can see for herself.
In the future, while continuing to work in her augmentation aide job, Guerrero hopes to pursue a master’s degree in school counseling, and she wants to find a master’s program that focuses on social and emotional learning. She understands now that while teaching is a much-needed profession — and the study of writing and literature has expanded her creativity, critical thinking, and communication skills — it’s not the only option for her.
“I want to support students’ academic, social, and emotional success,” Guerrero said. “The need for mental health advocates and for social and emotional learning instructors is greater every day. I want to be the person that students know they can go to and can trust.”
The College of Arts and Humanities at Fresno State 