Almost Thanksgiving!

Hello followers!! What a worlds win life it has been for the past couple of years!  Thank you for always keeping in touch and seeing what I am up to nowadays.  My apologies for the delay on my postings and lack of continuous updating, but I promise that I’m planning to reattribute my focus on keeping everyone in the know with my advocacy efforts. First things first, I would like to say that I finally graduated from the wonderful University of Texas at Austin with the class of 2014!  Hook ‘em \m/  !         I am now a proud Texas Exes!  On my graduation day, I was able to bring my tiny gopro camera with me to record all of the ceremonies, and I will post what I captured in a later blog post.  It was a long awaited goal of mine to graduate, but after a grueling experience in the hospital for half a year and then to follow with a semester off for competitive cycling, I came across the most important finish line… Receiving my diploma.  I graduated in the school of Natural Sciences with a major in Human Development & Family Sciences.  This major is similar to psychology, but with more focus on interpersonal communications, in a sociological aspect.  I loved it.  In a way, I do miss group discussions and delving into debated topics, but for now, I couldn’t be more excited to focus on my future.

I have been out of school for about 6 months and have been with my current job for almost three years.  I work as an advocate for a global vaccine company, where I am flown across the country to give speeches on my experience with the disease.  I do appreciate meeting all of the different nurses, doctors, clinical professions, etc and hearing their positive feedback from my speeches.  I now have been to over 32 states in the US due to my job, and I can’t wait to see that number go up.  Before I was in the hospital, I probably had only visited six or seven states?  It’s important to get my voice heard, especially when it matters.  In a lot of different states, they do not have mandatory regulations for college students and even middle school students don’t get their vaccinations against meningitis.  And so, if I can, I try to reach out to any political advisors or connections to show the importance on protecting innocent children from a vaccine preventable disease. Not only could I have lost my life to this disease, but many people are at the same risk and do not even know it.

Now with college out of the way, I am determined to dedicate my career and time to further spread the word on the harms of meningitis.  There might be some changes on the Jamie Group website, which will lead to more updates and blog posts to the website for people to follow along.  Thank you friends, family and people who I have not even met! Your support means a lot to me and I hope to see more of ya’ll soon.