Some Brandeis alumni miss the school and come back to visit. But Jose Ojeda '04, a Faculty Club employee and manager of the Expressway convenience store, loves it so much, he came back here to work."There are several reasons I've chosen to stay around here," Ojeda says about chosing to work at Brandeis while also working for the state of Massachusetts. "But the main motivation of mine for staying here is that I have been able to get a solid education and build excellent friendships with a good number of students and professors."

Ojeda, a native of San Salvador, El Salvador who now lives in Providence, R.I., says he has not had trouble finding work after college. After graduating from the Heller School of Management with a Masters in Human Services, he began work for the state of Massachusetts as a forecasting and caseload analyst for Mass Health members.

His job involves a lot of statistical projections of the number of members of Mass Health, which is the state's Medicaid program, by group, he says.

"Be it disabled children, able-bodied adults, disabled seniors or even Hurricane Katrina victims who have moved to Massachussets and are now on our program, I have to project over a two-year span how many of them will be on the plan and how much their expenditure is going to be over that duration," he says. "I work in what's called the budgeting sector of Mass Health. There are over one million citizens on the plan receiving assistance."

Ojeda says he chose Brandeis as a student because of the academic standards, the programs offered and the friendly student community.

"I very much enjoy working here and plan to stay around the warm and friendly Brandeis community," he says. "People are respectful, academically driven, and make an effort to show their appreciation for the hard work that undergraduate and graduate students do."

He says he was lucky to find Brandeis. Ojeda first stepped onto the Brandeis campus to visit a friend of his from El Salvador who was attending the school. At that point the thought of attending Brandeis did not cross his mind, but a professor got Ojeda thinking.

"A professor named Wilkins invited me to join the Transition Year Program," Ojeda said. "Then I met with people from the English as a Second Language Staff, because I didn't know a word of English. But then, I was told by my friend that Brandeis has a lot of programs to pay for tuition reimbursements, and at that point, coming to Brandeis seemed to be a possibility."

He says that dire circumstances initially drove him to move to America.

"In my country, El Salvador, there was a 10-year internal war," he says. "It was very dangerous and I had to come to America on what I thought was a temporary basis."

The conflict of which he spoke was the civil war between the Democratic Junta party and the Communist-sympathizing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerillas that officially lasted from 1980 to 1991.

"The war was really about land. Only a few people owned the land," he says. "It was a heavily agricultural economy, and others wanted their stake in the land."

While neither Ojeda nor his family were part of the farming community, he says that it was important-though difficult-for him to leave El Salvador.

"It was very hard for me to leave all of my family behind in El Salvador, but it was important for me personally to leave," he says. Part of the danger had to do with where he worked.

"I was studying at the College of Pharamacy, and the university in which I was studying had access to a lot of chemicals," he says. "Apparently, there were scandals and then investigations about terrorist groups acquiring chemicals from the university. So it was really fortunate for my safety that I got out of El Salvador when I did."

Ojeda was a pharmacist in El Salvador without an undergraduate degree before entering Brandeis. "But after realizing what opportunities there were here, I chose to stay."

He says that what he misses most about El Salvador is its people.

"The people of the land were such hard-working, honest people," he says. "While my family were not farm people, I miss that aspect of life and of a community."

While studying at Brandeis, he was involved in both Heller School functions and was an active member of Ahora!, the Hispanic/Latino awareness group. But he says that as a practicing Catholic, he also became involved in rituals of other faiths.

"I am Catholic, but most of my friends are Jews," he says. "Because of this, I have been participating in many Jewish weddings in the last few years. We have a very international campus here at Brandeis and we embrace all cultures."

Ojeda says that before returning to Brandeis to work, he considered working in different capacities but eventually chose to work for Aramark. "They have such good management policies and are so well-run," he says. "Particularly over the last few years, they have improved so much."

Shira Moffat, a colleague of Ojeda's at the Faculty Club, says that "he's one of our best employees. He's warm, friendly and approachable."

"When I am not working, I lead a very simple life," Ojeda says. He says that he ended a long-term relationship a little over a year ago and is currently single. He also enjoys weight-lifting as a hobby.

"I plan to do other things in the future, and continue my education," he says. "I hope to teach at some point in my life."

He has been accepted into a program to begin study toward his doctorate in chemistry this summer at the University of Massachussets at Boston.