Essay One
How will a Yale MBA help you achieve your personal and professional goals?
The Moment I Knew
Moment 1. “It’s so pretty, like princess hair,” a tiny voice whispered as a frail hand fingered my brown curls. “One day I’ll have hair like yours.” Her scalp was bare and dull, an after-effect of the chemotherapy that has sought to shrink the tumor in her anterior skull to operable size. In less than two days, Maddie would be undergoing a 6-hour surgery with one of America’s experts in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare head and neck cancer for which the survival rates are grim. In an immuno-compromised 8 year old, it was a last-ditch effort. If all went well, Maddie would go from the surgery into a 12-hour reconstruction, in which one of …show more content…
“So, what’s a typical day in the Department of Surgery like?” I asked the interview panel. To my surprise, they looked at each other and shifted – no one seemed to have an answer. Today, it dawns on me: this is not a difficult question, it simply does not have an answer. There is no such thing as a typical day, and each one will have the capacity to stretch me, burn off the dross of ineffectiveness, and mold me into a finer businessperson than I could ever have imagined. Some days I am a financial manager, budgeting, measuring, forecasting, and modeling for an $18 million organization that depends on my strategic vision to navigate the changing seas of healthcare regulation. Some days I’m an operational mastermind, reinventing our clinical flows and administrative functions to serve the needs of medical innovation. Other days, I’m a research fundraiser, closing deals for corporate support of clinical trials, including one on biomarkers for cancer cells. One such marker may have been able to flag the bad cells in Maddie’s body and flush them from her system, possibly even eliminating the disease from her tiny body before it took hold. Most days, I’m just a person who cares, one who sometimes has to define “malignant” to distraught parents fighting to comprehend, or argue with insurance carriers or even my own colleagues for better funding options for a family struggling with their coverage. More than anything, my current position shows me what I am at my core – a …show more content…
Today, I’m an Operations Manager in the Section of Otolaryngology and Program Manager for the Department of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. I joined ENT to put performance benchmarks in place to measure the real value we provide to our patients, to form more complete and efficient patient and work flow processes, and to help solve for the challenges of a new era in healthcare, one where the costs of failure are real. I find myself in need of deeper finance and accounting skills in order to follow through on one of the Department’s most complex sections; I’m in need of the highly sophisticated operations toolbox that I will undoubtedly need as I analyze my Section’s growth model and begin to execute on our geographic strategy, fanning out into new markets in Connecticut and beyond; finally, I’m in need of the functional and managerial knowledge that will allow me to most fully leverage my strengths and develop me into a more versatile healthcare professional. I want to help advance this field, to test and improve my strategy at Yale SOM, a place that will hold me to the highest standards of analysis, and school me in the messy art of
How will a Yale MBA help you achieve your personal and professional goals?
The Moment I Knew
Moment 1. “It’s so pretty, like princess hair,” a tiny voice whispered as a frail hand fingered my brown curls. “One day I’ll have hair like yours.” Her scalp was bare and dull, an after-effect of the chemotherapy that has sought to shrink the tumor in her anterior skull to operable size. In less than two days, Maddie would be undergoing a 6-hour surgery with one of America’s experts in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare head and neck cancer for which the survival rates are grim. In an immuno-compromised 8 year old, it was a last-ditch effort. If all went well, Maddie would go from the surgery into a 12-hour reconstruction, in which one of …show more content…
“So, what’s a typical day in the Department of Surgery like?” I asked the interview panel. To my surprise, they looked at each other and shifted – no one seemed to have an answer. Today, it dawns on me: this is not a difficult question, it simply does not have an answer. There is no such thing as a typical day, and each one will have the capacity to stretch me, burn off the dross of ineffectiveness, and mold me into a finer businessperson than I could ever have imagined. Some days I am a financial manager, budgeting, measuring, forecasting, and modeling for an $18 million organization that depends on my strategic vision to navigate the changing seas of healthcare regulation. Some days I’m an operational mastermind, reinventing our clinical flows and administrative functions to serve the needs of medical innovation. Other days, I’m a research fundraiser, closing deals for corporate support of clinical trials, including one on biomarkers for cancer cells. One such marker may have been able to flag the bad cells in Maddie’s body and flush them from her system, possibly even eliminating the disease from her tiny body before it took hold. Most days, I’m just a person who cares, one who sometimes has to define “malignant” to distraught parents fighting to comprehend, or argue with insurance carriers or even my own colleagues for better funding options for a family struggling with their coverage. More than anything, my current position shows me what I am at my core – a …show more content…
Today, I’m an Operations Manager in the Section of Otolaryngology and Program Manager for the Department of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. I joined ENT to put performance benchmarks in place to measure the real value we provide to our patients, to form more complete and efficient patient and work flow processes, and to help solve for the challenges of a new era in healthcare, one where the costs of failure are real. I find myself in need of deeper finance and accounting skills in order to follow through on one of the Department’s most complex sections; I’m in need of the highly sophisticated operations toolbox that I will undoubtedly need as I analyze my Section’s growth model and begin to execute on our geographic strategy, fanning out into new markets in Connecticut and beyond; finally, I’m in need of the functional and managerial knowledge that will allow me to most fully leverage my strengths and develop me into a more versatile healthcare professional. I want to help advance this field, to test and improve my strategy at Yale SOM, a place that will hold me to the highest standards of analysis, and school me in the messy art of