The sun is dipping low in the sky as I pull into Salem, but Jasmine Ames MBA’18 is nowhere near the end of her day.

Shortly before 6 p.m. on a Thursday in March, I meet Ames outside Kaneko Commons, where she’s about to teach a four-hour class on entrepreneurship. She greets me with a bright smile and very full arms. She’s carrying two phones, two bags, two laptops, and her second set of car keys for the day.

It’s fitting, since Ames squeezes enough for two lives into each of her days—at least.

“I just flew in from Sacramento,” she tells me as she flashes her keycard and leads me through the glass doors of the building.

Ames’ day started at the Housing California Annual Conference, where she met with clients for her job as vice president and senior DPS (deposit and payments solutions) relationship manager at US Bancorp, her employer for the past fifteen years. She started as a bank teller during college and worked her way up, gravitating toward positions that enable her to serve others. Now, Ames manages an affordable housing portfolio for the impact finance division and supports entities that invest in affordable housing across the Southwest.

↖ Even when her day begins hundreds of miles away, Jasmine Ames MBA’18 comes to Willamette every Thursday evening to teach a four-hour course on entrepreneurship.

“I grew up in a single-mom household with a lot of financial hardship, so tackling housing insecurity feels deeply personal to me,” Ames says. “A big reason I love banking is because banking touches everyone—and there are so many meaningful opportunities to help people through this industry.”

From the Sacramento conference, Ames returned her rental car and hopped on an afternoon flight to Portland, where she retrieved her own car and drove to Willamette to teach “Developing New Ventures” at the Atkinson Graduate School of Management. Tomorrow, she’ll lead a class on public management through the university’s Executive Development Center before driving to Vancouver, Washington, where she helps take care of her mother, who is ill and disabled. She spends half of each week in Vancouver with her mom and the other half in Seattle.

“A big reason I love banking is because banking touches everyone—and there are so many meaningful opportunities to help people through this industry.”

“I know I-5 so well, I could drive it in my sleep,” she says, sliding her car keys into one of her tote bags.

We get to the classroom and find seats in the front row. Ames relaxes into a hard plastic chair and turns to me with another warm grin. She does not look like a woman who just commuted across state lines and got stuck in traffic along the way.

The classroom environment is a familiar, and beloved, place for Ames. She pursued an MBA at Atkinson as a way to deepen her knowledge of strategy, finance, and marketing, and she went on to complete a doctorate in law and public policy at Northeastern University in 2024.

“After finishing my doctorate last fall, I was immediately asking myself, ‘How do I stay in academia?,’” she says. The answer was to teach, and the transition to moonlighting as a professor has been pretty seamless. Given that she spent three years squeezing a PhD into her spare time, she’s adept at maximizing the hours outside of her 9-to-5. She also somehow manages to maintain a fulfilling social life and to exercise nearly every day (“Peloton, because I can do it anywhere, or hot yoga,” she says).

This is her first full semester teaching, but you’d never guess she’s new to it—or that she describes herself as an introvert who doesn’t love public speaking. When 6 p.m. hits, Ames moves to the front of the room and starts talking to her students with confidence and ease.

Tonight’s lesson is on developing platforms for entrepreneurial ventures, a subject she knows well, having launched Panthera Beauty Accessories two years ago. Panthera offers a line of brushes, silk bonnets, and other hair accessories catered to women of color.

“I’ve had three Red Bulls and seventeen shots of espresso today,” she tells the class as she flips to her opening slide.

I know it’s a joke, but I can’t help thinking that’s exactly how much caffeine I’d need to get through her day.

↑ “I’ve had three Red Bulls and seventeen shots of espresso today,” Ames jokes as she flips to her opening slide. When she’s not moonlighting as a professor, Ames is a vice president at US Bancorp.

“I’m grateful that I’m able to contribute and be involved with things that matter to me,” she’d said before class. “I couldn’t show up like this for things that I didn’t care about.” Ames is motivated by her own upbringing and by how much her mom, as well as outside support systems, helped get her to where she is now. That’s why she serves on several boards, including those of the Salvation Army, Community HousingWorks, Share, and Willamette’s Board of Trustees. She remembers that similar organizations provided her with clothes, food, and school supplies when she was young.

As I watch Ames teach, it’s clear that all the caffeine in the world couldn’t help her fake the enthusiasm and energy she radiates for her work and her life.
At the end of our two hours together, a guest speaker takes over the class, and I get in my car and drive south on I-5, thinking about how it’s almost my bedtime, but Ames still has miles to go before she sleeps.

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Emily Halnon lives, writes, and runs out of Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of the memoir To the Gorge: Running, Grief, Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail (2024, Pegasus Books), a USA Today bestseller.