Joshua Bird ’01 How a Liberal Arts Education Prepared Him to Shift from Words to Numbers
As a liberal arts college, we prepare students not just for one specific job, but for all careers they will one day have. A liberal arts education equips students to think, research, write, and communicate, providing students with a holistic, well-rounded education. And as a Christian liberal arts college, our professors’ faith informs everything they teach, helping students develop a biblical world and life view. This is something Joshua Bird ’01 appreciates about his Covenant education.
Academic Disciplines Informed by Faith
When Joshua was applying to colleges, he specifically looked for a small Christian liberal arts school that took the Bible and the Christian faith seriously. Having grown up in the PCA, he was familiar with Covenant. He also had a familial connection with now retired professor Ed Kellogg, and had visited campus as a child so it felt like the right fit for him. Joshua majored in English and history and found Covenant to be just what he was looking for. He reflects back on his time: “I think all of Covenant’s professors made a concerted effort to tie their disciplines, and by extension the various associated professions, back to the faith and the acting out of that faith.” He appreciated the personal connection he made with his professors. They invited him to dinner in their homes. Several professors attended his wedding when he later married his wife whom he met on the first day of freshman orientation. He also found Covenant to be a safe place to ask questions and test long held assumptions as he navigated the transition from practicing the faith of his family to affirming the faith as his own.
He loved the late night discussions with fellow hallmates (including his roommate, now professor of political science, Dr. Cale Horne ’00) discussing the Bible and theology in community. These conversations were opportunities to flesh out what was discussed in the classroom and helped shape his deepening faith. He shares a favorite memory of talking with classmates about something learned in class from Dr. Voskuil. “I was part of a small group of four Covenant students who studied abroad at Oxford in the fall of 1999. The group of us were sitting in a pub talking about Dr. Voskuil’s Culture Box. The guy at the table next to us leaned over and asked, “Are you talking about Dr. Voskuil from Covenant College?” It turns out, we had gone to the other side of the world and sat down next to a recent Covenant graduate who was doing some graduate work at Oxford.”
From Studying Words to Managing Numbers
After Covenant, Joshua started out as a middle school teacher then worked in hotel management. He decided to then pursue an MBA because he wanted to work in the business world. Though he never imagined he’d become an accountant, he has remained in that sector the past twenty years. He began at a housing authority in Maryland, then in Connecticut, and is now the Chief Financial Officer at the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) in Nashville, TN.
He appreciates the public service nature of the work as public housing authorities run many of the federal government’s housing programs within a city or jurisdiction, including public housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs. The agency he works for helps house 30,000 Nashvillians. They also manage a number of the city’s development tools like tax financing and PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), playing a significant role in the development of modern Nashville. He says, “it’s about how I can both better individual resident’s lives as well as how our agency can create positive change in the city. That sometimes manifests as just making sure a resident gets a call back from the right person or planning the capital stack that makes building new affordable housing developments possible.”
Joshua found that his Covenant education prepared him well for the business world. He reports that he was well prepared for pursuing his MBA and found that having experience in writing his senior thesis (Senior Integration Project) at Covenant equipped him for writing a capstone paper as part of his MBA program. In addition, “Being an English major who then became an accountant, I feel that I do a better job at presenting ideas and translating numbers on a page to non-accountant decision makers.” He also notes that Covenant prepared him to live out his faith in his work, “I think Covenant does a good job of emphasizing that there are no facets that faith shouldn’t inform. Often for me it’s trying to show Christ’s love to others through empathy, kindness, and service no matter the setting–church, home, or work.
As Joshua can attest, a Covenant College liberal arts education prepares alumni not just for one specific job, but for every career pathway they pursue.