Alumni Alexis Jackman (left) and Patrick Clough at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Portland, Oregon, office
Patrick Clough ’97 looked at the name on the list and couldn’t believe it.
Patrick, who graduated from Eckerd College with a degree in international studies and high honors, works for the FBI as a linguistics specialist in the Bureau’s Portland, Oregon, office. For the past year and a half, he had been mentoring recent graduate Alexis Jackman ’23, who had wanted to work for the FBI since she was in middle school. “We did FaceTime, and I was coaching her on how to structure a resume, and then I walked her through the ins and outs of the FBI website,” Patrick explains.
When it came to where Alexis could be stationed, “I told her to cast as wide a net as possible,” he recalls.
“She said she had no geographical preferences but that it would be really cool to end up in the same office. And I thought, No chance. There are 56 FBI field offices across the United States. Then in February, over a half-year after she had graduated, I saw her name on the list of new hires at the Portland office.
“Of all the offices, she was able to get into this one. This is a dream come true for both of us. We work on the same floor.”
But then this was a mentorship made in heaven. After serving as a career contact, Patrick had stepped up to the Career Mentor Program in 2022. The program pairs current students and recent graduates with alumni who provide guidance during the transition from college to career. The first student he would mentor—Alexis.
“I added Patrick to the program because of the strong interest he had in helping students,” explains Maddy Gumprecht ’21, the employer relations and internships coordinator at Eckerd who leads the program. “Alexis’s dream was to work at the FBI, and Patrick would be an inside contact to help her understand the organization better and connect her to other contacts. Students are allowed to request any mentor as long as they have a reason, so even though his profession was outside of her major [chemistry], he was working for her dream employer.”
When Alexis was looking for a career mentor at the start of her senior year, she requested Patrick because she saw what he did for a living. As for where she wanted to be posted, Cleveland was her first choice because it’s close to her hometown of Solon, Ohio. But Portland also was on the list.
Patrick welcomed Alexis to town shortly after she arrived in Portland.
Not too long after she had graduated, the FBI notified Alexis she was hired—and that she would be stationed in Portland.
“I was excited and a little nervous,” she admits. “But it helped that Patrick and his wife put together a list of apartments to look at in the Portland area.
“Patrick has been incredibly helpful,” she adds. “When he was away from work for a week, he made a point of asking people I work with to make sure I was doing okay. And he introduced me to a really good group of people, who are now my good friends.”
“Some people at work have jokingly called me her work dad,” adds Patrick, who has two teenagers of his own. Both of his parents and an aunt graduated from Florida Presbyterian College in 1971 before its name was changed to Eckerd College. In fact, he probably wouldn’t exist if his parents hadn’t met at the College and been convinced by one of their own mentors that they would make a good match. “I couldn’t be happier to welcome the next generation of Eckerd alumni to the Bureau,” he says.
So now Alexis is an operations support technician for the Bureau. “It’s a good way to figure out how the office works as a whole,” she explains. “It’s a great position.”
And it’s not difficult, she adds, to see herself as a mentor someday. “I can absolutely see myself doing that down the road,” she says. “I was a training coordinator with EC-ERT [Eckerd College Emergency Response Team], and I really enjoy helping people.”
Gumprecht says she encourages graduating seniors to stay in touch with their mentors, as Alexis did. “Patrick shared many updates with me throughout 2023 and 2024,” Gumprecht says, “but the best one I received was the message this past February that not only did Alexis get hired by the FBI, but she was placed at the same site as Patrick.”
