CCO Campus Ministry

From CMU to Afghanistan to Berkley: Jacob Portnoff’s journey

“The CCO was a great motivator for me to think of Christianity as something more than just a thing to participate in on Sunday,” says Jacob Portnoff. “It gave me some intellectual frameworks to look at the world in a larger way and see how we can be ‘in but not of’ the world.

“While I was in the Army, that took the form of trying to exemplify servant-leadership and being willing to go the extra mile, even in dangerous and hard circumstances for those who were lower ranking or not of my group.”

Before Jacob’s four-year United States Army commitment, which included a deployment to Afghanistan, he spent four years as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He earned degrees in Information Systems and in Ethics, History, and Public Policy from CMU, and today, he lives in California, where he works as a data analytics engineer and is a graduate student at UC Berkeley.