ALBERT LEON - FINANCE
An Ex-Basketball Star’s Full-Court Press to Success

A high school guidance counselor told him he’d never make it. But Southeastern finance major Albert Leon graduated from college with a 4.0 and landed a job with PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s largest accounting firms.

Leon wasn’t the greatest student in high school. In fact, he finished his freshman year of high school with a 1.6 grade point average. But Leon was a basketball star back then and was recruited by Southeastern coach Dr. Ed Plastow. During the summer, however, Leon busted his knee and couldn’t play. Plastow, who’s also a business professor at Southeastern, encouraged Leon to still study at Southeastern, for it was Leon’s leadership that really impressed Dr. Plastow.

So began Leon’s full-court press to success at Southeastern. First, Dr. Plastow fought for financial aid for Leon, whose father died when he was 14, leaving him, his two siblings and mother financially strapped in Hollywood, Florida. Dr. Plastow arranged for Leon to receive need-based scholarships to help him pay for college. Next, there was the influence of other Southeastern professors upon his life. Leon appreciated how Professor of Accounting Dr. Bill Hahn didn’t accept mediocrity, but through increasingly difficult assignments and tests, he forced students to work harder to attain higher levels of achievement. Leon called a Southeastern marketing professor “the most encouraging person” he has ever known. And business professor Dr. Lyle Bowlin was always available to counsel Leon on academic as well as personal matters. Leon graduated from Southeastern with three majors: finance, accounting and pastoral ministry. He found his Advanced Accounting class with Dr. Plastow and his Investments class with Dr. Bowlin to be particularly useful, he said. And Dr. William Hackett’s Multi-Staff Ministry class schooled Leon in effective principles of leadership.

Leon’s stellar academic performance at Southeastern earned him the school’s Accounting Student of the Year award. In January 2004, before he graduated in May, Leon landed his job as an assurance associate with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Leon is a part of teams that audit companies. Most recently, however, Leon is helping bring a real estate firm into compliance with new federal legislation designed to prevent accounting fraud.

In the Christian tradition of service, Leon also is using his business acumen to run two not-for-profit theater companies in southeast Florida counties with his girlfriend Melissa King, who graduated from Southeastern too. The Lancaster Acting Company has performed Shakespearean plays with modern-day, American English accents and inflections every summer since Leon’s freshman year at Southeastern. The other company, Kidz Klassics, performs theater for youths at camps and other places such as a hospital for terminally ill children. Seventy percent of the camps for which Kidz Klassics perform lack resources for field trips, says Leon.

Despite his achievements, Southeastern’s influence still helps keep Leon’s heart grounded in Christ. Through his chapel sermons, Southeastern President Dr. Mark Rutland made Leon sensitive to doing things for Christ and not for the praise of men.

“It forced me,” said Leon, “to always discern the motives of whatever thing I’m doing.”