ROCKY MOUNTAIN (US-10)
Japanese Studies Librarian/Associate Professor: 2013 / 05 – present
JETAA Rocky Mountain, Secretary: 2020 / 03 – 2021 / 10
Hosted JETAA USA National Conference, Denver CO: 2018 / 09
JETAA Rocky Mountain, President: 2017 / 04 – 2019 / 03
JETAA Rocky Mountain, Secretary: 2014 / 04 – 2017 / 03
JET, Hyōgo-ken, Kōbe-shi, ALT 2004 / 07 – 2007 / 07
The JETAA community is a source comradery and friendship, bonded by our experiences as JET ALTs and CIRs to continue to foster the relationship between Japan and the U.S. at a person-to-person level. I have been active in JETAA events since returning from Kobe 2007 and held my first board position in 2014. Having lived across three different chapters and made many friends along the way, I’ve seen how JETAA creates opportunities for the communities around us and ourselves. I’ve had the pleasure to meet many amazing Alumni with a multitude of talents. As a CR I want to see our network grow, professionalize, and for Alumni to continue to create new friendships.
I served as President of the Rocky Mountain chapter. In addition to attending 2 NatCons and 1 regional NatCon, I had the pleasure to host and coordinate the 2018 NatCon in Denver, Colorado. I look forward to being able to help the next chapter host a NatCon with everything I and JETAARM board learned in 2018.
Further, the CR is a coordinator and facilitator to help each chapter succeed, grow, and overcome their unique challenges. The pandemic has been difficult on many of us, but we also have been given many new opportunities through the normalization of video chat. I hope to facilitate more cross-chapter collaboration for events both virtual and in person, having seen firsthand how creative we have all been. I believe chapters are in the best position they’ve ever been in to help each other and I hope to help connect junior board members with their more experienced equivalents on other boards to improve information/knowledge/and skills exchange.
I hope to improve the communication lines between JETAAUSA Board of Advisors, USJETAA, JETAAI, CLAIR to be more accessible. Having “many hands make light work” for any chapter that would like to take advantage of so much readily available help and talent.
I also hope to bring more concrete ideas and goals to benefit the JETAA Community. I want to be strategic and here what kinds of projects Chapters and their alumni would be most interested in:
- Coordinate creating a deck of slides to introduce each of the 50 states to be used for newly departing JETS.
- Understand that different technologies Boards are using to run their chapters to better connect Officers for exchanging ideas and practices
- Introduce creative commons licensing practices to better acknowledge the contributions of so many individual JETs, JET Alumni, and Chapter Boards
- Support Chapters to reach out to more diverse populations through university organizations for Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students, among many more.
- Help “find a home” for JETs in any number of places beyond the work of a Chapter board or the CR positions. Whether through working groups and taskforces that JETAA USA or USJETAA, or JETAAI has, or connecting to Japan American Societies to spread JETs out through diverse organizations and build our network into a variety of different groups that bests suites each of us and our talents.
- My research as an academic aligns closely with workflow analysis and best practices for managing data. I would love to work with any Chapter interested in streamlining their efforts.
Thank you for taking the time to consider my platform and to represent our 19 US chapters.
