As a member of the first team from Southwest Baptist University to travel with Passages
to Israel a few years ago, Jamison Whitehill knew that he wanted to return one day.
“That trip was an awesome experience, and as part of the trip with Passages, they have you do some additional follow-up afterward,” Jamison said.
Upon his return to campus, an inspired Jamison organized the Christians United for Israel club at SBU (the parent organization has approximately 3 million members). Passages, which is sponsored by the Philos Project and the Museum of the Bible Foundation, offers Christian college students the opportunity to experience the Holy Land and encounter the roots of their Biblical faith.
That time in Israel stayed with Jamison, so during his senior year the computer information systems major decided he wanted to get some real-world work experience before starting his job in September as a technical solutions analyst at Cerner Corporation in Kansas City.
Jamison learned about Task Sheriff, a small startup financial accounting company in Israel. He connected with a group to take part in a two-month summer internship where he worked in software development.
“The opportunity was mostly for personal education,” Jamison said. “It was pretty much to learn some software development techniques to get a feel for what a startup company looks like and working in the industry.”
Once Jamison arrived, he and the rest of the group stayed at a camp in Nes Harim, where they went through team-building exercises, lectures about safety, and rules and expectations for their daily lives in Israel.
Jamison began his internship on July 1 in a “storage closet” of an office in the BDO Tower in Tel Aviv, and he had to learn to adjust to a Sunday-Thursday work week, which is common in Israel.
During his internship, Jamison was able to “analyze the company’s current customer
on-boarding process and cross-analyze it by the competition to find unnecessary steps
in the on-boarding process,” he said. “This will allow customers to join the company
quicker and with less hassle.
“I also developed a react-native camera app and did a competitive analysis of every company in the industry that I could find. It’s all pretty complex and a little more than I’m used to, so I’ve had to do a lot of reading and my progress is slow, but it’s real-world experience.”
And with the encouragement he received from the SBU Computer Information Science faculty, Jamison was set up for success.
“My computer science faculty have been very persistent when they needed to be and pushed me on,” Jamison said, “but I think I needed that encouragement. A lot of my talents have been more refined by some of my classes; just figuring out what I’m good at.
“Specifically, in my degree, computer information systems has allowed me to see if I am better at programming or if I am better at the business side of things; do I work better with people, or do I work better with technology; or do I like working with people more but more on a technical level. That is kind of where I have found my area of focus. I want to work with people, but at a higher technical capacity. SBU has allowed me to hone in on what I am able to do through a lot of my different classes.”
In addition, SBU faculty – and the SBU community – have provided spiritual support to Jamison.
“I had a really rough year last year, and I was able to talk with one of the faculty members who works in my department,” Jamison said. “On all of her tests, the last bonus question is, ‘How can I be praying for you this week?’ She went out of her way to email me and follow up, and I thought that was really cool.
“Over the course of the last semester or two, the conversations that came about and seeing answers to those prayers specifically, was not in any way what I would have thought would have happened. It’s just completely different than how I would have expected those prayers to be answered, but I think seeing that they were in pretty unique ways has just been so exciting.”
Jamison’s time in Israel has made him thankful for the support he received while at SBU.
“I’ve come to realize it’s really easy to be lazy in my faith when there is literally no one here of the same faith,” Jamison said. “No one to encourage you, no preaching, no teaching; just me, my Bible, God, and a whole lot of distractions.
“This has actually caused me to miss my time at SBU, where Christian community was a pillar of my educational experience.”