How to go from scooping frozen yogurt on College Avenue to helping to expand a fledging network into a hugely successful organization is what Jamie Grossman Young '79 speech communication wants to talk about.

   Talk about with students, that is.

   “For me, college was learning to be on my own and how to get along with all different types of people,” she recalls. “And while learning autonomy and people skills is invaluable, no one ever talked about how to get the kind of job that I thought I wanted. I’d like to be able to help students through my own real-life experiences.”

    And real-life experiences—in a huge variety of situations—are a major part of Young’s current job. As head of talent at Discovery Communications, Inc., the parent company to a host of networks including The Discovery Channel, TLC (The Learning Channel), Animal Planet, Discovery Health Channel, Travel Channel, Science Channel, and Discovery Kids among others, Young and her staff are responsible for hiring all of the programming talent and negotiating their contracts. She is always on the lookout for compelling real-life people and situations and says that Discovery was one of the true pioneers of the reality-television trend many years ago.

   “We always specialized in everyday life,” she says. “When the network was just starting, we had more of a documentary bent. We started the tremendously popular home-renovation shows and then the trend really caught on.”

   Young began her career in the entertainment industry immediately after she graduated in 1979. A week after commencement, she and a friend picked up and moved to Los Angeles where they slept on the floor of the friend’s brother’s apartment. Finding someone who “knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody,” she found a job with a small production company that made commercials. After learning more about the business and which aspects she wanted to pursue, Young got job as an agent trainee assistant at Creative Arts Agency, one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood. After climbing the career ladder for several years as a feature film development and production executive, Young met her future husband, and the two of them decided to move back east to raise a family in 1993.

   “Although New York would have been a better career choice, we both liked Washington D.C. more,” she recalls. “I was very lucky to be introduced to someone working at Discovery, which was still somewhat in its infancy.”

   One of the first real hits for Discovery was “Trading Spaces,” the design show where real people decorate their friends’ houses. Young and her staff continue to hire all of the professionals on that show. One of her employees attends several home and garden shows each year, searching for telegenic designers, hosts, and carpenters.

    With Discovery now in 160 countries, its fourteen networks span the spectrum of genres. Young credits the vision of John Hendricks, the founder of Discovery, who, in describing Discovery programming, coined the phrase “edutainment”, a term not only currently accepted in the public lexicon, but a type of programming much imitated.

   While at Penn State, Young says that she did not seek out information that would help her decide upon a career and that she “learned her job on the job.” And while that learning curve has led to a very successful career, Young would like to give students more concrete guidance.

   “Working your way into and up the ladder in the entertainment industry is very competitive,” she says. “I’d like to be able to take away that unknown factor and tell students how I made the leap from college into the real world. I know I would’ve appreciated that kind of information when I was in college.”

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