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 nursing and what it still teaches her about advocacy today
How she accidentally stumbled into benefits while working at Webb County before she even had her degree
What it was like to be thrust into management early with no guidance and be told her tone was a problem
The HR director who sat her down with emotional intelligence books and met with her every week until something shifted
Why she believes benefits is the single greatest place in any organisation to change an employee's life outside of their paycheck
How she now intentionally invests in her team's growth, certifications, master's degrees, vendor relationships and beyond

Jessica Palacios is proof that the career you planned and the career you're meant for are rarely the same thing, and that a life spent in service to people can take more shapes than you ever expected.