Unexpected Life Lessons: Jay Joseph’s Trajectory from Campus Dishwasher to Honda Global Executive (BS, Communications, 1994)
By Kim Westerman | April 2025
When Jay Joseph chose UWSP, it was mostly because he knew he shouldn’t go to a Big 10 school as most of his high school friends had done. As he put it, he needed to “be independent, grow up a bit, and stretch [himself] toward a better work ethic.” Because on-campus housing wasn’t available for a Fall start at Stevens Point, the car-obsessed young man had taken an unintentional gap semester, during which time he rebuilt an engine and did odd jobs to save money. What he didn’t know then was that the small, seemingly inconsequential facts of his life added up to the fulfillment of his destiny as a skilled communicator — in the automotive industry, a field he loves and to which he has devoted three decades of his life.
Joseph was smart, but his native intelligence didn’t always translate in the academic setting. When he arrived at Point, he understood that his instincts to go to a small school were right. “By and large, the professors taught the courses (not teaching assistants), and class sizes were small. I could stop by Journalism professor Dick Kelly’s antique shop in town for a coffee with him or go out for a beer with Larry Kokkeler after class — I was ‘of age,’” he laughs. He credits both faculty and staff for helping him carve out his path, personal and professional. (Kelly passed away last year, while Kokkeler died in 1997, around the age Joseph is now, a sad fact not lost on him.)
Joseph worked his way up the ladder at the student center, from dishwasher — a job he loved because it allowed him to transform chaos into order — to student employment manager. A man named Bob Bush, whom he calls an “institution and a very level-headed fellow,” ran the show, and Jerry Lineburger, who was “incredibly generous with his time and taught me a lot about leadership,” says Joseph, was second in command. By the time he was a student supervisor, he had joined the Public Relations Student Society, and he says, “One of the best things about Point is that it had an emphasis on English as a Second Language; so many of the students I hired were from other countries. There was an amazing amount of diversity on campus, despite the school’s largely white local demographic.”
During his senior year, Joseph had rented a house smack in the middle of campus, at Portage and Reserve, and one day, he attended a ceremony to dedicate the student center to Lee Sherman Dreyfus, former UWSP chancellor and later governor of Wisconsin. As Joseph walked Dreyfus to his car after the event, Dreyfus recognized the house and asked Joseph if he knew who now lived there. And Joseph said, “Yes, I live there.” Dreyfus went on to tell the story of meeting with UWSP colleagues around the kitchen table and deciding, then and there, to run for governor. While Joseph wasn’t aligned with Dreyfus’ conservative politics, he described the encounter as a moment of civil discourse in what now feels like a bygone era.
After Joseph graduated, one of his first interviews was for an internship with Ford in Michigan that might have set him on a compelling career path. But it didn’t pay enough to make the move feasible, so he reluctantly declined the offer. His parents were not pleased at the high phone bill their son had run up in his job search efforts, and what happened next seemed like a movie plot: He found a toll-free 800 number for the Mitsubishi New Bureau, and, to cut to the chase, this fateful call launched his career at Manning, Selvage & Lee, one of the largest corporate PR firms in the U.S. Flash forward to today: Joseph joined Honda in 1998 and has had many roles there in the last 27 years — he currently leads business development and sustainability initiatives. And he’s just been promoted to President of Honda Australia, so he’s got a one-way ticket to Melbourne to start the next chapter.
Joseph’s still-evolving narrative is what he calls the “summer job theory” of career development. He says, “You can do anything for a finite period of time, and you can learn skills you didn’t even know would be useful by not saying no to brief opportunities whose reasons are unclear.” He put it all together in an improv class he took to help him improve his communication skills. “In that context,” he adds, “we don’t say no, we say yes, and.”
