UCCS alumni utilize education for success - John San Agustin

John San Agustin has been working at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office for 14 years, where he supervises the investigations division. He has consulted on cases like the Lacey Peterson case and the JonBenet Ramsey case and has been teaching at UCCS for the past six-and-a-half years.

San Agustin graduated from UCCS in December of 1992. Along with only 33 other graduates, San Agustin walked away with a degree in electrical engineering.

In the competitive field of electrical engineering, San Agustin worked for several companies in what was then known as Silicon Mountain. This was the Colorado Springs area at the west end of Garden of the Gods Road where companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel are housed.

While working for a company in 1992, San Agustin designed an application that was used in the first case in the country involving the reconstruction of a crime scene and showing it on a computer.

From there, he worked on some other high-profile cases until he was hired by the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in 1995 to help with unsolved cases. He was able to give positive results for those cases and eventually started working on cases such as the Chuck E Cheese murders in 1998. For that case he was a consultant for the prosecutor.

When asked what particularly memorable events in his career were, he considered perhaps JonBenet or Lacey Peterson.

He said, "Those are the ones that are most notable. The most memorable are the ones where you're dealing with victims who are still alive, the kids who were sexually assaulted as a kid. You never forget those cases. There's no way you can."

San Agustin said he never expected that he would be working in this field when he graduated. However, he still believes that he learned some things that he still uses in his career today.

He said that the electrical engineering degree program can be very stressful. "I can tell you, my senior year, I didn't sleep more than 24 to 30 hours a week," he said. But the stress of earning what he describes as a "hellacious degree to try to obtain," helped him build the attitude of getting the job done and working past mental stress.

He added that the classes he got the most out of were the interpersonal communications and writing classes he took. San Agustin is a self-proclaimed geek and is thankful for the communication skills he obtained. He said they made him a better leader, teacher and speaker.

"How do you captivate an audience as a geek?" he asked. "They don't care how smart you are, you gotta have that communication [skills]."

San Agustin has advice to students who want to go into the criminal justice field: "Don't be discouraged, and be willing to do things for nothing."

He credits a lot of his success to just getting his foot in the door. To students who ask how long it took to get where he is, he said, "It doesn't happen overnight…this is 20 years later."

Although he said it sounds corny, he also said to, "Have a dream, dream big, and never give up."