{"podcast":{"title":"Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw","slug":"inspiring-women-with-laurie-mcgraw-3258296","podcast_index_feed_id":3258296,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/inspiring-women","website_url":"https://inspiringwomen.show","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/12325a02-f7fb-11ec-a33e-eb24deb6b6ff/image/8ca44c9b61353ea8f1eff71da0c2743c.jpg?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"Laurie McGraw","episode_count":246,"summary":"Advancing women to healthcare leadership–and keeping them there. Women comprise 70% of the healthcare workforce. They hold just 20% of the C-suite. Each week, host Laurie McGraw bridges that gap through conversations with the women rewriting healthcare’s leadership playbook.","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/inspiring-women-with-laurie-mcgraw-3258296"},"episode":{"title":"From Quitting Nursing 2 Semesters Before Graduating to Managing Benefits for 50,000 People | Jessica Palacios","slug":"from-quitting-nursing-2-semesters-before-graduating-to-managing-benefits-for-50-000-people-jessica-palacios","published_at":"2026-03-03T14:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/inspiring-women-with-laurie-mcgraw-3258296/from-quitting-nursing-2-semesters-before-graduating-to-managing-benefits-for-50-000-people-jessica-palacios","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/inspiring-women-with-laurie-mcgraw-3258296","url":"https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/DHT5059622576.mp3","audio_url":"https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/DHT5059622576.mp3","summary":"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 degre…","meta_description":"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…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1656,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/inspiring-women-with-laurie-mcgraw-3258296/episodes/from-quitting-nursing-2-semesters-before-graduating-to-managing-benefits-for-50-000-people-jessica-palacios/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/inspiring-women-with-laurie-mcgraw-3258296/from-quitting-nursing-2-semesters-before-graduating-to-managing-benefits-for-50-000-people-jessica-palacios.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}