‘Order Out of Chaos’

Austin Community College vice-chancellor explains her unusual career path

Angela Hodge, BBA ’03, MPA ’04, calls her first job in England’s Heathrow Airport the “come up” that showed her where her math and money prowess could take her. In the hectic airside gift shop, she exchanged currencies for international travelers and thrived on the daily challenges. Hodge has nurtured what began there into a special skill set that has carried into every role in her impressive accounting career.

“My gift in business is making order out of chaos,” she says. “I can look at the mess, and I can tell you how to clean up the mess.”

After moving to the U.S., Hodge began courses at Austin Community College (ACC) before transitioning to Texas McCombs to study accounting. After graduating, she spent more than nine years working at UT in various roles, eventually serving as assistant director for Accounting and Licensee Compliance in UT’s Office of Technology Commercialization.

The department was struggling to collect revenue on UT’s intellectual property royalties, so Hodge learned everything she could about the university’s current patents and their inventors. Then she collaborated with global business partners in negotiating and enforcing licensing agreements. Once she had met these challenges and turned the department around, Hodge sought a new learning experience — which led her to Apple Inc. in 2013.

As Americas finance manager at Apple’s largest Global Finance Shared Services center, Hodge was recognized for her innovation in streamlining global business processes. Her office oversaw trade payments, disbursements, cash forecasting, and banking, handling $1 billion a week. Even then, Hodge reached a point where she had achieved everything in her niche and began searching for her next challenge.

“For me, it is about making a difference,” she says. “There has to be something for me to solve, or it would just be dull.” Hodge’s craving for an operational efficiency puzzle, along with her intrinsic desire to effect change, led her in 2017 to ACC, where she now serves as vice-chancellor, Business Services.

 “This environment has offered a plethora of interesting opportunities for me to learn,” she says. In her position, Hodge ensures the six departments under her purview — Bill to Pay, Payroll Services, Procure to Pay, Materials Management, Record to Report, and Treasury and Finance Transformation — effectively steward more than $500 million in resources. These departments oversee a significant portion of expenditures for ACC’s 11 district campuses.

Hodge appreciates how her accounting work touches every aspect of the mission at ACC, ensuring the college continues to grow and equip more students with knowledge.

Spreading knowledge is a lifelong passion: Hodge has been a sought-after royalty audit and licensing conference speaker, a longtime volunteer and champion for the community’s financial literacy and food insecurity efforts, and founder of an internship program at her office.

She recalls when she began her role at ACC: “I thought, ‘I wonder what I can learn. I wonder what we’ll be able to do.’” It’s that sense of yearning for knowledge and challenge that has guided each step of a remarkable career.

By Alexis Brubaker