Office of Communications: Personnel
Betty Cushion
Want to know who's pulling the strings when it comes to project delegation at the Office of Communications? Meet Betty. She is the operator behind the job request system, taking an e-mailed project entry and assigning it to the right OC staff member for completion.
It's a big change from years ago when she was in charge of logging duplication center jobs once a month.
"When we started doing our reports on computer, I would have to go across the hall to entomology and use Dr. David Adam's computer to log all our jobs," Betty said.
Her full-time tenure with the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences started in 1982. But she was bringing joy to the staff earlier than that, coming in after classes at Tift County High School.
That part-time job took Betty Cushion from the family farm on the Tift-Turner county line to CAES' print shop in Tifton. Now that she looks back on spending summers in the field, she has trouble remembering how she survived the heat.
What she does hold dear is the warm reception she received when she started working for CAES.
"I always enjoyed working the print shop because of the people," Betty said. "The people were easy to work with. It wasn't a pressure job. We always had a lot to do. I always enjoyed that. I knew I was going to be printing something interesting, and it was always something pertaining to our area of the country."
In 2003 she moved to a new position in the Office of Communications and is now part customer service representative and part administrative assistant.
The niche she made for herself has a long description. She’s a print liaison for the campus, picks up and delivers the mail, clips articles, represents the OC when people have questions and assigns projects to other OC staff.
When Betty heads home in the evenings, her family – made up of mostly boys – keeps her busy. Between her husband Larry, sons Jason and Matthew, and grandson Malachi, she has a lot on her plate. And she gives Saturdays to her mother.
"We enjoy cooking and doing a lot of church projects with our youth group," she said. "Getting ready for the holidays, we do a lot of pies and cakes – coconut, pecan, sweet potato. Most of the time we have fun talking about old times as we do it."