How to Get a Real Education: Becca Bearden Creates Her Own Amazing Learning Experience

By: Katie Jackson

They say that education is part academics, part life experience. For Rebecca Bearden, it’s also all about being curious and involved and making your own learning experiences happen.

Bearden—“Becca” to her friends and family—a senior double-majoring in agricultural communications and wildlife sciences, is president of the Ag Ambassadors (the official student hosts for the College of Agriculture) and is a woman whose interests and openness to new ideas seem to know no boundaries.

Bearden grew up on her family’s 1,000-acre cattle farm in Maplesville, which she describes as a “perfect, ideal setting.” It is a place where she and her 20-year-old sister, Rachel (a CoAg animal sciences major and an Ag Ambassador) were deeply loved and nurtured by their parents and where they learned to work cattle, ride horses and love the out-of-doors. It is a place that Bearden says she will always consider home—always want to go back to.

Still, the 23-year-old Bearden has also long-harbored a yearning to discover the world outside their 300-cow ranch. “I always had a huge drive to leave home and go out and do, and be and conquer,” she says. She has managed to do just that—both physically and mentally—and still stay close to her roots.

Bearden knew from an early age that she wanted to be involved in agriculture on some level. She grew up working on the family ranch and attending bull sales and she found out through those bull sales that there were actually people out there who wrote about cows, not just worked them. She then found out about CoAg’s agricultural communications major.

“From day-one I knew this was a major for me,” she says. “I love the College of Agriculture, I love the writing, I love the reporting, I love the photography and I love talking to farmers and telling the stories of people in agriculture.”

Though she has finished her course work for that agricultural com-munications degree, she still has another year left in school because she added a second major to her academic accomplishments.

“I decided to also get a degree in wildlife in part because I wanted to delay graduation,” she admits. “I felt like there was something else that Auburn had to offer to me. I picked wildlife because I enjoy the outdoors and want to learn more about land management, conservation and plants and animals and how they all fit together.

“Being in agriculture, you already see those natural connections more than many people might, but in wildlife it goes a little deeper and you see how agriculture affects nature. To see how those two work with and sometimes against one another has been very interesting to me,” she adds.

Bearden has also relished being in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences because it has allowed her to interact with a whole new group of professors and students and encounter new ideas and ways of thinking. Her innate curiosity and openness to new people, ideas and experiences also took her across campus to work at The Plainsman, AU’s student newspaper for which Bearden has written articles and a column (it was called “Becca’s Bull”) on all sorts of subjects—from the arts to agriculture to hunting and fishing.

Her education has not been limited to the academic world, either. Last summer, Bearden worked at Yellowstone National Park as a park ranger where she did environmental education programs for visitors. She also did a lot of hiking—learning how wonderful it is to go alone to the top of a mountain—and met an amazing cross-section of America (the world, actually) through her interactions with the visitors.

The summer before that Bearden interned with Southeast Farm Press and found out about the agricultural world beyond her initial beef cattle connection. “That was fun because the editor, Paul Hollis, sent me straight out into the field and I was able to meet people and write about all sorts of things from peanuts and cotton and even tobacco production,” she says. In addition to all those experiences, Bearden has been active in AU student organizations.

Not only is she president of the Ag Ambassadors, she has been involved in Block & Bridle, Ag Council, Alpha Zeta, Collegiate FFA, AU’s Wildlife Society and AU Young Farmers, serving as an officer for several of these groups.

As busy as she is, Bearden is more often impressed with her fellow Ag Ambassadors. “Every time I go into a meeting and stand at that podium, it touches my heart,” she says of her Ag Ambassador presidential duties. “They work so hard, they are so good and I so appreciate all that they give.”

And while she admits that sometimes she has to stop and regroup just to keep her own schedule on some manageable track, Bearden believes that the diversity in her life is a wonderful thing. She firmly believes that having a background in several disciplines will be a real advantage for her as a communicator, and being a good communicator will help her educate people about those things she finds important—agriculture or wildlife or anything new that gets her attention.

Bearden will graduate in May of 2007 and doesn’t have specific plans just yet for her future. “If I could work for the Forest Service in the summer and write the rest of the year, that would be great,” she says. And she has a great interest in going to Texas and experiencing that “cowboy” culture. But she also has another idea. “Someday I would really like to have my own magazine—maybe a wildlife/beef magazine,” she says.

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