Jill Normington ’94 of Washington, D.C., observed her milestone 25th reunion by making her first trip to campus in more than 20 years and by increasing her Oxy Fund gift to $2,500—$100 for each year since graduation.
“Growing up in a military family, I never kept friends,” she says. “The friends I made at Oxy are still my friends.” A principal at Normington, Petts & Associates—the political consulting firm at which she became a partner in 2007—Normington majored in psychology at Oxy and uses those lessons as a pollster “every single day,” she says. “Professor Elmer Griffin taught us how to use clinical psychology in a very directed applied setting. We published papers. We presented research at conferences. My Oxy experience was foundational in developing me into the person that I am.”
With a client list that includes members of Congress in at least seven states, “I’ve got incumbents to protect for the races that we won in 2018,” Normington says. She was reading about Campaign Semester in Occidental magazine when she saw a photo of an Oxy student with one of her clients, Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota. Normington would welcome help from any students interested in jumping into next year’s campaigns, she adds: “I work on a bunch of them.”