Dearine Perks As a 20-year Juniata employee, Dearine, whose nickname is “Petey,” shares what must be one of Juniata’s most unique assignments—keeping Brumbaugh Academic Center sparkling clean. “It takes a lot of energy to get through the building because it’s so spread out,” she says. It also takes a lot of explaining to visitors where the offices and classrooms are in the multi-wing, multi-level building. “It’s easier to take visitors to where they want to go than explain directions,” she laughs. BAC is not her first assignment. She started as a residence hall custodian in North, then cleaned Founders Hall and the Enrollment Center, then moved to Lesher and has been in BAC for about a decade. In such a spacious building, she has to be highly organized. All classrooms are done first, then the bathrooms and she finishes with offices and other spaces. She scours half the building from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Barry Kelly cleans the rest of the building from midnight to 8 a.m. She’s glad the long flight of concrete steps leading out of the C wing are gone. Not because she had to shovel them (although that was a big job). “I was always afraid one of the students would slip in the winter,” she says. When BAC was devoted solely to science, she always wore gloves to clean in case any chemicals were spilled, but these days she makes sure everything remains neat and clean—even the rooms where biologist John Matter keeps his reptiles. “I love animals, so I talk to them,” she says. “They know my voice. When I come in the turtles and lizards will turn and come up closer to the glass. The snakes don’t care.” Dearine has a son and three daughters. Her daughter Laura Bennett is a 1994 graduate.
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Dave Aurand
55
2012 Spring-Summer
Dave Aurand, group leader for conferences and events, treats every job—whether it’s setting up hundreds of chairs and tables for an awards banquet, or pounding in a tent peg—as an opportunity to influence a potential student to come to Juniata. “At any event, people are seeing more and more of our campus and if we can go the extra mile to present Juniata in a great way, the better it is for us in the long run. After all, the students are the reason we all have jobs here,” he says, smiling. Aurand, known as “Big Dave” by one and all, has been at Juniata for six years. He signed on with the college after working at MeadWestvaco and working a couple years in advertising products associated with dirt-track racing. He even climbed telephone poles as a job. He’s no longer climbing to great heights, but his work at Juniata setting up almost 500 events a year is a dizzying pace—not that he wants to slow down. “I love not knowing what’s around the corner and I love helping people make their event special,” he says. He says he loves interacting with people and he may know the name of every employee on campus and most of the students. He certainly knows the name Katelyn Aurand ’14, his daughter, who is studying early childhood education. With his assistant, Gary Norris, Dave has a hand in almost every event but Commencement—and that’s only because he’s busy setting up commencement-related events. He even has been known to zip down the water slide at Mountain Day. “I work with so many different people—faculty, staff, students, athletics—that I feel my job is working with the entire campus,” he says. “I look forward to coming to work every day.”