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Don Frey’s career has taken him from the U.S. Air Force to the workforce to academics. Now, after a 30-year career as an educator, he’s looking ahead to a well-earned retirement. But not without reflecting on his legacy and his time at the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC).

“This is the best job I ever had, quite frankly,” says the Assistant Professor and Program Chair for the Bachelor of Arts in Accounting and the Master of Accountancy programs at the Forbes School of Business and Technology® at UAGC.

Don joined the University as an adjunct professor in 2006. At the time, he’d been teaching for about 12 years, but those roles weren’t remote. An online university turned out to be a dream come true.

“Three months after I got the job, my wife closed her business, and we moved to Florida,” he recalls. “We had always planned someday to move to Florida, but both of us had jobs that kept us in one place.”

Don became a full-time member of the University faculty in 2012, and in 2018 he took on the role of program chair for the accounting program.

“It’s been a great experience, and they’re a wonderful group of people to work with,” he says.

With his UAGC tenure winding down, Don now has plenty of time to enjoy the laidback Florida lifestyle and even indulge in his lifelong passion for cars and car culture. A proud owner of a 1992 Mazda Miata — purchased on a whim — Don has spent years cruising and enjoying car shows. The feeling, he explains, takes him back to his days growing up in Iowa.

“I was a street racer for a couple years and spent a lot of time in a ’65 Barracuda, one with the great big back windows in it,” he says. “Cedar Rapids had a strip about 10 miles long, and we used to cruise the strip at night and race from light to light.

“I got lots of tickets.”

Who could have predicted that a young street racer would grow to become a leader and mentor for generations of students? The answer to that question can be found in Don’s professional journey.

UAGC Faculty Don Frey

From the Air Force to Academics

When Don graduated from high school, he wasn’t prepared to go to college.

“I bounced around from a couple of jobs, and then I decided I’d spend some time in the military and that would give me a chance to figure out what I wanted to do with myself.”

In the Air Force, Don served in several capacities, including munitions, and set his sights on building skills that would translate well in college and life.

After serving for four years, Don used the G.I. Bill to pay for his education and earned his accounting degree and Certified Management Accountant (CMA) credentials. This cleared the path for him to transition into an accounting career and spend time in the manufacturing sector.

“That was a lot of fun, I enjoyed what we did and the process,” he says. “And I quickly figured out that I could be a better accountant if I knew more about the process.”

Don’s career led him to greater experience as a cost accountant, working in payroll accounting, as a controller, and eventually to a role as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Iowa Weston College. After a seven-year tenure, he moved into teaching full-time, and later earned his master’s degree.

The Importance of Structure

Joining UAGC was a “dream job,” not just because of the flexibility, Don explains. The position offered him the chance to take everything he’d learned in the Air Force and workforce and apply it to academic lessons for the next generation of accountants and business professionals.

“There’s structure to accounting and there’s a process,” he explains. “When you get to the end, you know what you have is right if you do it correctly.

“For me, the plus to it is I always had a knack for being able to look at a series of numbers on a financial report. and spot things that just didn’t look right.”

He emphasizes to his students that modern accountants are more than “bean counters” and play a crucial role in shaping organizational strategy and driving growth. Students who share that mindset and passion for problem-solving, he says, are in the perfect position to succeed in the accounting field, where structure means everything.

“My mom was a school teacher, my dad was a mechanic, but neither one of them were particularly structured,” he says. “Personally, it’s a place that I found as a comfort zone for me. I could relax when I knew everything was where it should be.”

That’s when the “fun” part of accounting kicks in, he adds. It’s not about “chasing numbers around” as much as it’s about being involved in the high-level decisions that affect the future of a company.

A Career to Be Proud Of

Throughout his UAGC tenure, Don has served on numerous committees and task forces – he also participated in events hosted by the Forbes School of Business and Technology® including “Backwards IS Better” during the Teachers of Accounting at Two Year Colleges Conference in Long Beach, California.

Looking back on his career, Don says it’s not about how much money he made or how many promotions he earned. Rather, he takes pride in his ability to collaborate and lead fellow faculty members.

As Don points out, things don’t always go the way people want them to in an organization, but there’s usually something positive to focus on. It’s something everyone in accounting and even the business and academic worlds should understand.

It’s equally important for the people running an organization to acknowledge when something isn’t working and strive to find a solution, come to a compromise, resolve disagreements, and figure out what needs to be accomplished to get to the next step. This is an approach he embraced while at UAGC and worked to find solutions when a problem arose.

“You can’t just say something isn’t going to work, you have to find what will,” he emphasizes.

A Future of Possibilities

Don is a widower, and he enjoys talking about his wife and the lives they built together over a span of five decades. In what is a statistically rare occurrence, they were high school sweethearts who both also had successful careers in accounting. Don took the corporate route, and his wife built her own business, but their compatibility extended beyond work.

He reflects fondly on their love of cars, among other shared experiences.

Before her passing, Don says he and his wife talked about his future.

“She said, ‘I think you have to stay at least a year and see how you feel and how things go and what you're going to do and don't make any major changes,’” he says. “And she was right. It was a good thing to do.”

Don's retirement is officially set for January 3, but his passion for teaching will continue as he remains an adjunct faculty member at UAGC.

“I'm at the stage now where I think it's time for me to do something different, and I always said in my career I wanted to leave when I was still considered to be doing productive work and not coasting into retirement,” he notes.

At 70, he looks forward to spending more time with his family in Maryland, especially his 9-year-old grandson, while keeping his love for learning alive by teaching the occasional course.

“I’m going to miss being here,” he says. I’ve had a great run. Great people to work with who have a lot of dedication.”

The accounting programs at UAGC are not designed to meet the state educational requirements for a specific professional license or certification in any state.

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