Hi, my name is Bekah, and no, I am not Irish!
I am the Music Director here at KNOM! My job includes taking care of our music library (which takes up most of the second floor!), listening to and choosing new music to add to our library, producing a couple spots (including a movie soundtrack spot, which is a lot of fun to work on!) and a couple hour-long special shows, as well as a few other smaller responsibilities. And most days I am on the air about three hours in the late afternoon/early evening!
I am a navy brat (my dad was in the navy for most of my childhood,) so my family has spent time all along the Eastern seaboard. But most recently and for the longest amount of time (14 years,) my family has lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the heart of Amish country, (but WE aren’t Amish :)). So moving up to Alaska has been a crazy, big adjustment for me and my family. I just graduated from Grove City College in Western PA, with a degree in Communication Studies, which is coming in handy here at KNOM!
I arrived in Nome in August, at the end of what had been a rainy summer. Despite the wet weather, I was still able to enjoy the plenitude of daylight, with sunset around midnight and sunrise before 4 am. Then the daylight hours started to shrink, slowly but surely, to the point at Christmas time when we had about 3 and 1/2 hours of light! Nowadays, we have sunrise at about 10 am, and full dark waits until after 6 pm to descend. It is really rather fascinating how just a few minutes more light every day can add up over a week or a month!
Right now, I am the only female volunteer, with three male volunteers as housemates, which creates an interesting atmosphere at our house! Thankfully, my housemates are awesome guys. (Non-awesome guys probably wouldn’t volunteer a year of their lives at the North Pole!) And they’re good friends, so most of the uncomfortable stereotypes and potential situations of male/female relationships are avoided! They are also really great cooks! Almost every night there is something of gastronomical interest happening in our kitchen! Living with these guys, and seeing them at work everyday is fun; but you don’t want to see the same mugs all day every day, so getting away from home and work, hanging with friends, or going to movies or the library, is nice!
I would suggest that if you are at all interested in radio, in volunteering your time, and in traveling, apply to KNOM. You never know what will happen. You just might end up here at the (figurative) top of the world next year like I did!
Bekah
