Brenda Sallee College of Business
Annabel Ortega Alumna ’08 | College of Business
Five times the persistence of most graduates
An interruption in a person’s college career is not unusual. Annabel Ortega, however, has persisted through five of them.
Ortega had joined the National Guard, in part, to help pay for college. Since 2000, she’s been deployed overseas five times, including 18 months in Iraq.
Throughout Ortega’s deployments, Brenda Sallee kept in constant contact — mostly via e-mail across multiple time zones — encouraging her and coordinating the sequence of classes she needed to complete her degree in business administration.
“It’s been hard, but helpful to have that one person who cared for you,” Ortega says, “Without Brenda, I might not have stayed in college.”
