"The education was more than just the classrooms," says Jeff Hansen, program director at KUOW 94.9 FM, a public radio station in Seattle, Washington. "It was everything else combined."
An Ashland native, Jeff originally planned to attend college in California, but after his father passed away unexpectedly in 1972, he wanted to stay closer to home. Northland was the clear choice.
During his time on campus, Jeff got involved in the Ashland Folk Festival, an annual event still held on campus each spring. Northland also introduced him to poetry.
"I remember going to Professor Lee Merrill's poetry readings," he says. "I think I learned as much there as in my classes. And I learned a lot in my classes."
Jeff graduated from Northland in 1976 with a degree in broadfield social science. He first took a job with the Wisconsin Employment Service, and, while working or the state, had his first opportunity to test the radio waves.
A local public radio station sent out a request for volunteers to serve as talk show hosts. Jeff jumped at the opportunity and began hosting a morning news and information show. Eventually, he left his job with the state to work for the station full time.
Later, Jeff made the big switch from hosting and producing content to serving as a program director at a small public station in Maine. He then moved to bigger stations in Houston and Dallas before taking his current position in Seattle in 2001.
Instead of being in the studio developing stories, Jeff makes the decisions about what programs to run at which times, what news to pursue in depth and what to skip. Basically, he decides what listeners hear.
Though Jeff never went into teaching as he had initially intended, he says that Northland also prepared him to educate people in a much broader sense. "I just decided teaching wasn't what I wanted to do. But what I ended up doing is very much in the educational mode." There's more to Holly's job
than just turning the lights off.
