While studying abroad in Puerto Rico, a fellow Penn State student suggested Jamie take SOC 119, taught by World in Conversation (WinC) co-founder, Dr. Sam Richards.  Upon returning to the University Park campus in the fall of 1999, she took the class and was subsequently invited to join the facilitation team.  She accepted and, during her time facilitating dialogues, she saw her group transform from distant strangers to ones actively seeking goodbye hugs; this was after an entire semester of navigating difficult conversations across various historically tenuous racial and gender divides. That experience left an indelible mark on her and it is what drove Jamie to reach out to Sam years later.  Since reaching out and ultimately joining WinC, Jamie has worked across many teams. Throughout her decade-long tenure at WinC, Jamie has focused a lot of energy on the intentional use of lightheartedness to impact WinC culture with profound effect. Even after shifting to new teams, the legacy of her involvement remained.

In her current position as a Video Content Curator for SOC 119, Jamie selects thought-provoking moments from the class to be transformed into one-minute clip compilations for social media to spark discussion as well as engagement with the course which, by extension, brings more attention to WinC. In addition to Jamie’s role as a Content Curator, she offers English conversation and grammar study sessions as a pilot program for one of WinC’s global partners. In providing the sessions, Jamie draws from an array of both formal and informal teaching experiences. Those experiences include participating in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET Program), engaging in language exchanges and leading various types of language sessions for multigenerational learners of English, Japanese and Spanish. Another source she draws from is her approximately 2.5 decades of personal study of over 6 languages.

Jamie is from the Washington, DC metropolitan area.  She graduated from Penn State in 2001 with a degree in Letters, Arts and Sciences (Thematic title: Business Concepts and Cross-Cultural Communication) with minors in Spanish and International Studies and a concentration in Japanese.