The Safety Net She Wished He’d Had

Shara Anderson didn’t plan on a career in human resources. She planned on being a marriage and family therapist — until the clinical work made her realize she’d absorbed too much of others’ pain to sustain it. So she pivoted, spent time in Taiwan, learned Mandarin and landed in translation project management. It was a perfectly reasonable path, but it was not the right one for Anderson.

It was grief that clarified everything.

Anderson said when her husband, Craig, was killed in a workplace accident, she was left a widow with a 9-month-old son and a fury she didn’t yet have language for. What she did have was a front-row seat to the inner workings of a system that she felt could have done much more to keep her husband safe on the job.

“I just remember being like, what an absolute…”  she trailed off. “There was so much infrastructure, so much process, so much room for development that was just not present.”

She couldn’t undo what happened to Craig. But she could learn the systems that should have protected him — and spend her career building them for others. So she went back to school, earned her human resources degree and applied for jobs at NC State 13 times before finding her way in. Today, she manages the university’s background check program, helping to close the gaps that can let danger slip through.

“I felt the negative impacts of when it’s not being done correctly,” she said, “and the positive impacts of when it is.”

Her advice to anyone sitting on a career change? “If it’s been on your mind for a while — just go do it.”

She believes Craig would have wanted that for her, too.

From Managing Theaters to Finances

Alan Porch was supposed to be a teacher, but somehow he ended up managing the finances of NC State’s Department of Mathematics.

Within the Raleigh native’s very first week at Appalachian State University in 1997, an introductory education class dissuaded him from following his teaching plan. Meanwhile, an organizational meeting for WASU, the campus radio station, intrigued him. He switched his major to communications on the spot. “I didn’t want to teach,” Porch said. “Radio seemed like it was cool, and I could get right on the air.”

That snap decision launched a career built less on five-year plans than on saying yes to the right people at the right time. By graduation, Porch had a job as a night DJ, earning $13,000 a year, a very modest salary even by 1990s standards.

A friend nudged him toward graduate school in theater management at Louisiana Tech University, where he would earn his master’s degree in 2001. Later, the artistic director of his West Virginia theatre company handed him an Actors’ Equity card and pushed him toward bigger stages and bigger responsibilities. Over several years, he stage-managed rotating repertory seasons, sometimes with a different show every other day. When the business manager retired, he walked into his boss’s office and asked for the job. He got it. Soon, he was running a million-dollar budget, handling payroll and accounts, presenting balance sheets to the board and assisting with grants.  

In 2005, Porch’s mother’s health began to decline, and the five-hour drive back and forth between West Virginia and Raleigh to support her became too much. So he left West Virginia behind and applied for opportunities in Raleigh to be near her. One day, NC State’s University Temporary Services called and sent him to NC State’s English department. That was in 2006. He’s been at NC State ever since.

“You get very focused on the path that you think you’re on,” Porch reflected, “until someone reminds you that there are other ways to go.” 

Again and again, he found what he calls his “tribe” — a family of mentors and friends who spotted something in him before he spotted it himself. And again and again, he said OK.

Today, he manages multimillion-dollar budgets and chairs the UNC System Staff Assembly. The theater kid who ran from teaching turned out to be a pretty good businessman.

His advice to new grads? “Don’t sweat it. Just adapt.”

The Humanities Hire That Helps STEM Students

A middle school elective on ancient cultures planted a seed in Freha Legoas that would quietly shape everything that followed — her degree in religious studies, her instinct for listening and, eventually, her career as a graduate services coordinator at the Department of Biological Sciences.

“I had a very Indiana Jones complex,” she said.

A Miami native, Legoas graduated from Florida International University with a degree in religious studies and a minor in psychology. She had loose plans to teach, but life — a father’s long illness, part-time jobs, a move to Gainesville, Florida, and a marriage to an Army officer — had other ideas. She landed her first university position as a graduate secretary at the University of Florida’s Department of Environmental Horticulture.

“I didn’t even know what environmental horticulture was. I had to Google it,” Legoas said.

What she discovered in her new role surprised her. She loved the problem-solving, the student advocacy and the human puzzle of it all. Skills she’d built writing research papers and analyzing competing world views translated seamlessly into navigating policies and meeting students where they were.

When her husband’s duty station brought her to North Carolina, she applied to NC State, taking a chance at another opportunity to work in academic administration. NC State hired her, and 10 years later, she’s still here.

Using the NC State Tuition Waiver Program, Legoas eventually earned her master’s degree through NC State’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program — studying Middle Eastern history, purely for the love of it — while at the time juggling the loss of her father, her husband’s deployment and a full-time job.

Her advice to anyone anxious about a non-traditional path: “It’s OK to deviate. You can end up somewhere significantly better and unexpected.”

For Legoas, that somewhere turned out to be exactly where she belongs and who knows, there may be another pivot in her future.