From Quitting Nursing 2 Semesters Before Graduating to Managing Benefits for 50,000 People | Jessica Palacios

About this episode

Jessica Palacios shares her journey from nursing to managing benefits for over 50,000 people, highlighting key experiences and lessons learned along the way.

Jessica Palacios was two semesters away from her nursing degree when she walked into a patient's room mid-clinical and found an elderly woman alone in the dark, covered in bed sores, on the wrong mattress, with photos of her family taped to her IV pump. When Jessica raised the alarm, her professor told her to worry about it when she was a real nurse. She sat in her driveway and cried for 30 minutes that evening. That one moment sent her on a decade-long journey through accounting, psychology, sociology, and business before a faculty advisor finally looked at her history and said, you should be in HR. What followed was a 20+ year career at the Texas A&M University System, where Jessica now serves as Associate Director of System Benefits Administration, overseeing healthcare and benefits for over 50,000 covered lives across one of the largest university systems in the United States. In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Jessica to unpack the full journey, the pivots, the promotions, the hard feedback, and the leadership lessons that only come from doing it the hard way. They discuss: The clinical experience that forced Jessica to walk away from…

People in this episode

Host: Laurie McGraw

Guest: Jessica Palacios

Topics covered

• career transition
• nursing
• human resources
• advocacy
• leadership lessons
• benefits administration

Keywords

• nursing
• HR
• benefits management
• career change
• leadership
• advocacy
• Texas A&M

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Texas A&M University System

Places: Webb County

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