She baby-sat, delivered newspapers, and was hired as a host and waitress at a family-style restaurant called Jelly's Eatery.
A year before Jaime was to graduate high school, Madeline was diagnosed with malignant stage II breast cancer.
Jaime, who always believed her parents' busy life on the road prevented Madeline from getting an earlier diagnosis, quit most of her extracurricular activities to help care for her mom.
Upon her arrival on the west coast, Jaime quickly found herself a cramped apartment in a college town and a job working at a local bar.
She enrolled in the psychology program at the nearby college and was able to afford tuition since she had saved up a little bit of money while taking care of her mother.
In a bioethics class she took as an elective a few semesters later, she met a highly regarded professor, Dr. Will Anthros, whom she eventually started dating.
The fourth episode confirms that Sommers can feel pain through her bionic limbs, such as when she accidentally damages a toe after a jump.
The reimagined version of Sommers is recruited by a covert anti-terrorist organization and early episodes of the series have shown her training to be an agent, while trying to uncover who within the agency is actually trustworthy.
After his funeral in the second episode, Jaime Sommers discovers he had kept a secret dossier on her dating back two years which contained her IQ test results, photos and personal history.
A multi-episode arc of the show introduced the character of Jaime Sommers (played by Lindsay Wagner), a woman who received bionic implants after a near-fatal accident much like Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man (Sommers was a new character created for television; she did not originate in Caidin's novels and thus was considered the creation of writer Kenneth Johnson).
The original Jaime Sommers was considered a feminist icon, described by Time magazine as "the most appealing argument for feminism" in 1977,[2] as well as a "latter day Wonder Woman,"[3] referring to the DC Comics superheroine.
This also extends to the relationship between Jaime and her foil and antagonist, her tragic nemesis Sarah Corvus, which has been described by reviewers as sharing similarities with the Buffy/Faith dynamic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.