The Serendipitous Road to Success
Jaime Schwartz ’01 NUTR is one of the lucky ones – she spends her days doing something she loves as a career. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been some twists and turns along the way, mind you; but, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, her career path has ended up exactly where she hoped it would.
Jaime came to Penn State in 1997 intent on pursuing a pre-med degree; however, it only took her a semester to realize the major just wasn’t right for her. “It was just too much science,” she recalls. “There was nothing tangible in it for me. So, during my second semester, I decided to take whatever classes I wanted to take.”
One of those classes Jaime took was a one-credit nutrition course. “I absolutely loved the class,” she says. “I knew this was the major for me.”
It wasn’t much longer after that that Jaime would discover her career choice as well. “During one of our Careers in Nutrition classes, several registered dietitians came in and told us about nutrition-related opportunities within business and industry. It didn’t take me long to realize the career path I wanted to take.”
Jaime immediately started e-mailing Penn Staters and others in the field to find out what she needed to do to follow a similar career path. “The message I seemed to get from everyone was pretty much the same,” she says. “They told me there really was no set career path, so I needed to create my own.”
That initial career path, however, found Jaime following one of the more traditional routes traveled by nutritional sciences majors: a dietetic internship at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey followed by a position with New Jersey’s Monmouth Medical Center as a clinical dietitian. Although she enjoyed the experience, she knew it wasn’t where her long-term ambitions rested.
About the same time that she was wrapping up her internship and starting her first job, Jaime decided to participate in the mentoring program offered by the American Dietetic Association’s Dietitians in Business and Communications. She was paired with Roberta Duyff, a nationally recognized food and nutrition writer and expert. During several e-mail exchanges over the first few months of their relationship – they had not had the chance to meet in person yet – Jaime shared her career ambitions with her mentor.
That’s when fate intervened. While attending a conference in August 2002, Duyff happened to step on the elevator with one of her colleagues – Dr. Carol Byrd-Bredbenner, a nutrition extension specialist at Rutgers University. During their conversation, Byrd-Bredbenner mentioned that she had just been awarded a grant and was looking for a graduate student to work with. Duyff mentioned that she just happened to know someone in New Jersey who was perfect for the role and was considering going to graduate school.
It wasn’t too long after that – January 2003, to be exact – that Jaime’s career path was back on track as a graduate student at Rutgers. “My master’s degree was in nutritional sciences, but I was able to tailor my program to meet my interests,” she says. “For example, I chose a research methodology offered by the College of Communications; I got to do a lot of writing.”
Jaime’s life would take another serendipitous turn while at Rutgers – it would take her back to her Penn State roots. Not only was her adviser a Penn Stater – Byrd-Bredbenner received her Ph.D. in nutrition from Penn State in 1980 – but Jaime also used the groundbreaking 1984 study on portion sizes by Dr. Helen Guthrie, Penn State professor emerita of nutrition, as the basis of her master’s thesis.
Although she had never met or taken a class taught by Guthrie, she was familiar with her work. “Dr. Guthrie was so ahead of her time,” Jaime says. “She was talking about these kinds of things twenty years before anybody else was.”
Coincidentally, Byrd-Bredbenner was also familiar with Guthrie’s work – her husband was one of the participants in Guthrie’s study.
Jaime’s study reinforced Guthrie’s initial findings, and then some. In addition to people not realizing how many calories they consume because they can’t accurately estimate portion sizes, the perception of what typical portion sizes are have increased over the past twenty years; as a result, people’s waistlines continue to increase as well.
Results of the study were published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in September 2006. Jaime has been quoted in Elle, Men’s Health, Life, Today’s Dietitian, as well as internet resources such as WebMD, and ScienceDaily.com. An Associated Press story, which included quotes from Jaime, Byrd-Bredbenner and Guthrie, was distributed nationally in December and received significant internet, print, and radio coverage.
Today, after receiving her master’s degree in 2004 and “getting her foot in the door” at Atkins Nutritionals and then Kraft Foods, Jaime is working at what she calls her “dream job” – she is a senior account executive in the Food and Wellness group at Ketchum Public Relations, one of the most recognized public relations firms in the world. In this role, she helps develop strategic nutrition communication strategies and health professional outreach programs for companies such as Frito-Lay, Kellogg’s, Wendy’s, DSM Nutritional Products, the California Strawberry Commission and the California Dried Plum Board, to name a few.
“I’m one of only three registered dietitians at Ketchum, so I can help bring a unique perspective not only in New York office, but also across Ketchum’s North American and Global Food and Nutrition Practice,” she says.
Outside of the office, Jaime remains actively involved in the American Dietetic Association; in fact, she now chairs the mentoring program for the Dietitians in Business and Communications practice group.
Jaime also stays connected with Penn State and currently serves as the secretary of the Nutrition and Dietetics Alumni Society.
“I’ll always carry that Penn State tradition with me,” she says.
Further proof that, no matter where your career path might lead you, it can always take you home.
