What is your current role in health care?
“I am at MHealth Fairview in the Enterprise Project Management Office as an Enterprise Project Consultant. I help to support our leadership team on strategic and special projects around our organization.”
What stands out as a favorite memory during your time as an MHA student?
“I really loved my graduate assistant experience. I got to have a very front-row role leading the candidate interviews for one year, which was such an awesome experience. I was able to meet with all of the excited incoming prospective candidates. I got to tell them all about our program and get them excited about the MHA program and the University of Minnesota in general. One day we were keeping track, Alexis Meyer and I, and we noticed that there were a lot of the people that came to our Friday session who ultimately accepted their offers. I like to think it was a little bit because of our excitement.”
How has the MHA Program helped prepare you for your career?
“I think the classes that focused on preparing us with hands-on skills needed on Day 1 were very helpful, like Justine Mishek’s Strategy and Marketing class and of course the problem-solving class. Those projects and exercises help to enforce key skills like the importance of business communication and business writing. I also enjoyed the focus on all of the team projects. In healthcare, you are going to be working across so many teams, so it’s always great that our project teams were mixed up with different people and we developed all sorts of different communication and organization skills.”
What challenges and opportunities will healthcare leaders encounter in the next 5-15 years? What skills will leaders need to be successful in light of these challenges and opportunities?
“One of the things that I am excited about, which will be both a challenge and an opportunity, is the continued shift to digital offerings within the healthcare system. As a millennial within the organization and as a healthcare consumer, I’m always looking for things like online scheduling, e-visits, and convenience offerings. I think the pandemic helped to jumpstart a lot of focus on digital innovation.
An important skill will be the ability to be flexible as a leader and know when to pull in a wonderful expert. I think leaders need to know how to diversify their teams. Leaders need to make sure that they have all of the perspectives and skills in the room they need to respond to challenges fast. I’m learning in my role some clinical and technical components, but I’m so grateful to work with clinical experts that truly understand it, and I can develop my skills in project management and strategy and then collaborate with those clinical leaders.”
If you could give one piece of advice to a current student, what would it be?
“Current students should take advantage of all of the awesome ways that the MHA program prepares them for being a contributor right away on their first day. I think the program has such a great reputation that they can feel confident coming into their new role, knowing that they’ve been prepared and people will value their input right away, just based on their great background from the program.”
Why is your class the best class ever?
“Our class was great. We had some really great personalities in our group. For our end-of-the-year banquet, a few of our classmates made a very hilarious video pulling together some of our inside jokes from over the years. They even got some of our professors to participate in the silly video, which was so fantastic. So I think we have great attitudes and a great sense of humor in our Class of 2019.”
