Bethany Crane

The best career advice I received was to trust the process and to trust myself. When you're learning a new skill and taking on an entirely new profession, there's a lot of self-doubt about your abilities and whether you're going to understand everything. But the way that we teach things and have built things, there's a very effective process. If you trust the process and just trust that you'll learn and grow, then you'll make it, basically. That really helped me overcome the uncertainty that comes with starting something completely new.

The biggest challenge in my role is that online education is really hard in general for people to be able to learn a whole new skill without being right there with someone to guide them. Distance is definitely a challenge. However, we have really great students and different opportunities now to try to help them overcome the distance gap. We have lots of resources now, way more than we did way back when I was a student, so it's continuously improved. As for opportunities, if you are a gemologist, you have a lot of different opportunities and areas that you can get into - everything from auction houses, appraisal work, on-site staff gemologists, to teaching, to working in a laboratory. Really, the possibilities are endless as far as jewelry is concerned and the gem world. We have lots of students all over the industry, and it's really fun to hear the different experiences and different paths that people take. It's got a lot of really wonderful areas and opportunities within that field.

The values I hold most important are having attention to detail, acting ethically always when helping either clients or students, and embracing a principle of continuous learning - always being willing to learn more and improve your knowledge base. These guide both my professional work as an instructor and how I approach helping others in the field.