Meet Jose Pacheco: Already Putting His Degree to Use

Jose Pacheco graduated through AIU Online with his Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Accounting and Finance in June, 2006. By September he should be happily settled into a new job at the church he has worked at for 15 years. The new job is not only a promotion - from Information Office Clerk to Supervisor of the Information Office - but also comes with a raise.

Jose says it is because he finished his Bachelor's degree that he got this promotion and raise.

"I was offered this new position because of the skills I learned at AIU. Well, that and the fact that I'm now more marketable and my bosses knew they could lose me to someone else. They didn't want that to happen."

Although Jose will now head up the Information Office, which would seem to have little to do with accounting, he says his degree with a concentration in Accounting and Finance is practical. "I can now look at financial statements and spreadsheets and understand them."

Jose says he had little experience with finance or accounting when he started at AIU. He started with lots of transferred credits from the four years he spent at the University of Texas, Austin in the early 1980s, but, back then, he was studying for a music education degree.

"The only knowledge I had about finance was what I had learned through observation at work. This made me nervous at first, especially since AIU Online is a totally different environment than the school I had gone to before, but eventually I learned how to manage my time and things fell into place."

More general parts of Jose's education have served him well at work too. "The director of the Basilica was very impressed that I have the technology skills to do things like teleconference and chat rooms and work around different time zones. These are all skills I picked up through AIU Online."

It sounds like Jose is going to need as many skills as he can get in his new position. As Supervisor of the Information Office, Jose is responsible for disseminating important information to all 200 of the Basilica's employees as well as the general public. He not only helps determine the content of the Basilica's website but is also charged with improving it. (Thankfully Jose has plenty of ideas about this!) Jose will also publish a newsletter for employees. "I look forward to the challenges that this new position will present."

Jose says that he probably could have done the job without going back to school - although he couldn't have gotten it without his Bachelor's degree - but "it would have been a lot harder. I could have learned most of what I'll need to know for it on the job, but I do believe that what I learned from instructors through AIU Online will make it so much easier."

"I believe I can achieve greater goals because of my education at AIU."

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