Conversations with Team Fuqua: Health Care Club

- Hi, my name is Jess Levitt. We're here to talk to you today about the Health Care Club and how the club can help support you in your recruiting journey at Fuqua. I'm joined by the Health Care Club co-presidents, Amber and John and I will have them give a quick introduction in just a moment. But first I'd like to introduce myself. I am the sector director for health care in Fuqua Career Management Center. What that means is that I'm the career coach for all students who are interested in pursuing careers in the whole health sector. So that might mean that you're interested in payers, providers, pharma, biotech, med device, across all sort of functional areas. So you might be interested in healthcare consulting, healthcare finance, marketing. There's a whole host of career opportunities in healthcare and the club supports them all as do I. And I would love to have Amber and John give just a quick intro about themselves. - Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Amber and I'm a second year here at Fuqua. I was a nurse for about 11 years before deciding to get my MBA. Obviously stayed within healthcare. I was at DaVita this summer and then we'll be going to United Health Group for full-time in the spring or summer. - My name is John. Did not come from a healthcare background. I'm what many people here call a career-switcher. Most recently before Fuqua I was working in regulatory compliance at a hedge fund in New York City. This past summer I interned at another fund focusing more on biotech and healthcare investments. Most likely that's where I'll be going back once graduation rolls around. - Thanks guys. So I would really love to just talk a little bit about the healthcare club, what the purpose of it is, what you guys do to sort of support the healthcare community at Fuqua. It's a robust club and you guys do a whole lot of stuff, so I would love it if you could tell me a little bit about what you view as some of your major activities. - Yeah, I think the 5,000 foot view is it's students helping each other navigate the recruiting process within the big, big world that is healthcare. What that means in real terms, we run through a series of activities starting with our symposium in the fall, which is sort of a day in the life of different healthcare roles and industries. We do a week in Cities trip during fall break where people go to Boston and actually visit the offices of several companies that are recruiting on campus. We have Lifeline which is a series of sort of presentations what to do and what not to do throughout the recruiting process. Touches on everything from how to network effectively to how to best write a cover letter. And then the last big activity, which is our spring activity, is the conference, which this year the theme is sort of a what's next, what are the pioneering practices that are coming to healthcare in the future? - So the big kind of difference between the symposium and the conference. The symposium, we really focus on allowing, especially first years, a glimpse into different aspects of the healthcare industries since there's all sorts of functions. And then the conference is a full day conference, less recruiting base and much more kind of topics that are interesting to students and industry professionals as well. - Great. Beyond just like these events, are there other ways that the club supports students? Do you do any sort of help with connecting with alumni or interviewing? - We do. So, we have a really robust alumni network here at Fuqua, which is very helpful. So we do two main programs with the alumni. The first is mentorship, so we pair up a couple of students with an industry mentor just to kind of get someone that you can know more about the healthcare industry and have a little bit more one-on-one FaceTime with them. But then we also do mock interviews both with alumni. We schedule those as well as a big super day with the second years to allow first years to really practice prior to the alumni mock interviews. - Great. And is the club all about work or are there some other things that you guys maybe do as well throughout the year? - We definitely try to include non-work things involved. We had a really fun holiday party that we co-hosted with the Health Sector Management last week.

So that was a really big success and I think we're going to try and do more in the spring. Fall ends up getting much busier than you expect, so things don't happen as quickly as you expect. But we try to throw social events in there as well. - We had a barbecue planned for as like a welcome event and it we got rained out. So unfortunately that was the only weekend that worked for most people. - Very good. So that's, that's helpful. I'd love to dive into especially your recruitment prep series that you mentioned. The students call this series Lifeline. But tell me a little bit about when do those sessions be begin and how does that really line up with when the recruiting journey starts at Fuqua? - So this year we started I think the second week of September if I'm not mistaken, right around there. And for our year we decided to do it on Tuesdays at lunch and did it for six consecutive weeks. That adjust a little bit year to year, but we kind of line it up to the beginning being how to network with professionals in September and that way you have the tools you need as the sessions progress to continue in the recruitment process. - Yeah, I think it's very specifically designed to target certain activities or concerns that students have as those things start to come up. So for example, as application deadlines start to draw near, we do a workshop on resumes and cover letters. When the networking heavy period of it is happening, it's much more focused on how to build relationships and how to maintain them so that you have a strong advocate when applications roll around. - Great. Is there anything else you'd like to say about that series that might help the students understand just how much support they get from the club? You know, what topics, you know, could you do a quick rundown of what things you help the students really understand through the club and through this series? - So it is a five to six session series. This year we added an additional session which I think was really helpful. It was an international student section just to really kind of give international students a better idea of the differences between recruiting as an international student. And like John said, we really start with like how to network, how to make connections and kind of move step by step. We also in inserted a special casing session this year, which I think sounds like it was really helpful just because even though you don't, you think of casing as a consulting interview thing, basically all industries are involving cases now. - Yeah, I would say like the, the main helpful thing is that in the broad world of all on campus recruiting among different sectors and types of jobs, there's probably a lot of similarities. But what I think Lifeline really helps well with is the little nuances and knits that are specific to the healthcare industry and how to mo most effectively prepare yourself to be ready for when those roll around as opposed to like a generalist perspective across finance, consulting, marketing. - Yeah, I will say I've seen the students give these sessions for many years now and this year I think they did, you know, they keep expanding it and improving and it's an iterative process and this year it's I think reached a peak of incredible helpfulness to the first year students, helping them from everything from networking to resumes to understanding how to build out a list of companies that they're interested in to, you know, specific nuances for students without permanent work authorization and then the different types of interviews and how to tackle those when they come up. So it's a really helpful thing that you guys do and I'm glad that the club is able to offer that as a support. So just to discuss that a little bit, interview prep is something that the club does, but it's also something that the CMC does. So can you talk a little bit about how you guys work together with the CMC? - You want to start? - Yeah, I would say, I mean we have weekly meetings with Jess right here. So, we have a very good relationship just kind

of working through kind of I would say ad hoc things that come up, but also kind of a longer term strategic planning for activities that are happening throughout the year. When it comes to I guess the more formal like mock interview and recruiting prep, Jess helped us out with like coming up with good behavioral questions to ask during our second year mock interview process. She attends every lifeline session and can chime in with lots of experience and wisdom from over the years. She's a wealth of knowledge of context to reach out to. So from that perspective, like we do work pretty, pretty closely and I would say just overall like it's a very symbiotic relationship where we kind of bounce off each other. There are things more in your wheelhouse versus ours but we know how to navigate those pretty well. - And I think also like Jess is just one person, so having the club to also help, you know, with these mock interviews and things available, there's a lot more second years that can jump in as well. So having that relationship's been really helpful. - I think that's an amazing summary of that and I will also give a shout out to you and all the other club members. So one thing that the club has over me while I've been at Fuqua for 11 years and know many students who have come through these halls as well as many alumni, the truth is that they've done it more recently, they've gone and done internships and they can share their experiences and having people who are going through the same thing as you or who have recently gone is just so valuable in helping you prepare through this process. So speaking of people who have gone through these halls, I know you guys mentioned a little bit about the alumni engagement piece, but I just wanted to give a shout out here to our healthcare alumni advisory board. They provide a really great amount of support for the students specifically in healthcare. They tend to be those whose staff are our mentoring program that the students mentioned as well as the mock interviews. And I just wanted to see if you guys could talk a little bit about how it's been to engage on those, those particular initiatives. - Yeah, the Healthcare Advisory Board has been Healthcare Alumni Advisory Board. It's like I'm missing an A. They have been super engaged and really helpful this year. We were very excited. We just kind of wrapped up the student sign up for mock interviews and we had over 50 slots this year, which is huge. Like that's a ton of time that the alumni, you know, obviously they're just volunteering their time for an hour, multiple times a day to do these interviews. So that was really helpful. We also had, do you remember how many we had sign up for mentorship? - It was 30 ish. - Yeah. - Which is also a huge number of people that are just willing to help you because you're a Fuqua student. - Yeah. Speaking of that, wanted to talk a little bit about the other ways that alumni engage with the club and so can you tell me a little bit about sort of the speakers for the symposium and the conference and you know, who the club goes and visits on that weekend city strip you mentioned? - Yeah, I mean I think for cities in particular during that planning process, we tended to reach out first to alumni that were at the company and they were so excited to make it work. Like there's a few that come to mind but like they remembered going on this trip as a student and they wanted to make it as memorable and as helpful as they possibly could for the students going on the trip now in 2025. So yeah, like from that perspective, really excited, really kind of just shows how thoughtful they were but also how kind of like persistent that Team Fuqua spirit is even after graduation. - I think similarly for symposium we had a couple of, you know, we had a really good lineup of speakers and then flights got canceled or you know, things happened and we had multiple alumni that bounced, jumped in day of day before to go ahead and speak to our students and did an amazing job with Zero Prep whatsoever. - Yeah we are lucky to have an amazing healthcare community, not just at Fuqua but that lasts well beyond the two years that you'll spend here. Well that brings us towards the end of the questions that I'm going to be asking.

So I want you guys to be thinking of all the questions you have for John and Amber, but I want to know what is one thing you guys wish you'd known before you had started your job search? - I think I would say not to, well it's easy to say now, but I feel like I was stressed that I wasn't going like kind of in a linear, like I know exactly what I want path, which is kind of how I've always been like I'm going to do this and then this and it doesn't always work out that way but it does usually work out eventually. It just doesn't feel as straightforward as you hope it will. - I would say maybe like getting a better understanding of kind of like where specialties and focus areas are. 'Cause healthcare again is like so, so broad and so big and so many people do so many different things. So like just having a sense of like if you really into pharma, each company has like a specific focus area or disease area that they're very concentrated in. And having a sense of what that is so that you just kind of like start building that knowledge and you can start to build an idea of what you might be passionate about would be really, really helpful. - Also don't 100% stress if you don't know coming in. - Yes. That's the other. Yeah. - Absolutely - There's for sure time to learn just like keep that. - At least being - I wish I had known before to like start thinking about it prior. - Yeah, absolutely. And last but not least, what advice would you give to an incoming student across healthcare in any of the sub-sectors? - I think kind of having an idea of why you want to go into healthcare, even if you don't know what function or industry is really helpful, especially, I'm guessing John can talk to this more but come, I'm guessing coming from a non-healthcare background you kind of want to show why it was a little easier for me to say like, look I was a nurse and now I'm obviously staying in healthcare but I still had to explain why I was getting out of bedside nursing and wanting to transition a little bit. - Yeah, that's a great one. For me I would say it's used this time to like really be thoughtful about kind of experimenting, I think try different things whether it be activities or experiences but also like play with your leadership style and play with how you work with teams. It's a relatively low risk environment I think and it's a really good time to like try out things that you might not have that had the chance to in a more traditional professional setting. - Great. Well, I'm going to move to some questions that have come in here. Here's a great one. So for how healthcare consulting recruiting process and prep, can you guys share a little bit about it? You talked how Lifeline prepares, but can you go a little bit more into what maybe like the case prep session involved and then how the healthcare club sort of works as a supplement to what the consulting club might be doing? - Yeah, on the casing front that came about because more and more companies are in their interview process doing what we call a mini case sort of not like a traditional consulting case, but along those lines, similar type of prompt, maybe probably less math. And so we wanted to help students one, just like be aware that this is likely to come during one of your interviews, but two, here's how you can like, prepare and be best, most knowledgeable about like what it is to like think about these things in a structured or Missy way as the consultants like to say, understanding how to basically attack a problem statement and be ready to go after it. On the whole, I think one thing that like our prep is really good about is like understanding the why, not only the why of healthcare but the why of like specific companies. Is it the people, is it the culture, the focus area of the diseases or types of that's on the pharma side, but more if you wanted to do payer provider, like why payer provider, why specifically that company and what they're doing? Because again, like so many companies, even though it sounds like they're in the same industry or vertical, they are very different.

And so like knowing why they're different and what sets them apart is I think like a very important point that we try to drive home. - And for healthcare consulting in particular, there are a couple of healthcare specific consulting companies but then a lot of the big companies also do healthcare consulting. So a lot of times we suggest kind of mixing and matching our information along with the consulting club information 'cause they do a really great job of preparing people for actual consulting interviews. - Yeah. All right. So I am going to go to the next one down here. This is for you specifically, John, for students who come to Fuqua without a healthcare background, which elements of the healthcare club and Fuqua curriculum were most helpful in building a solid foundational understanding of the industry? - I think HSM bootcamp is great because it lays a really strong baseline for everyone to be on the same playing field as the curriculum develops from there. As someone that came from a very different industry, I'd heard a lot, a lot of words maybe, but didn't fully understand how they worked. And so I think like getting that really intense, just kind of like here is all the information about how the US healthcare system works upfront was really helpful for me. I would say the even more helpful one is my fellow classmates. So many people come from a wealth of backgrounds and have a total, like they've been in the industry and they've been doing it every day for years and years. And so you could talk to one person from one pharma company or one person from a payer and you can get that kind of more on the ground specific knowledge about how these things work. But like having established that baseline, I knew what the right questions to ask as I got into these conversations were. - And I'll say like even coming from obviously very healthcare background, like I had nothing to do with any other portion insurance, pharmaceuticals. So similarly like bootcamp really gave you that much better overview versus like on the ground only kind of taking care of your patients. - Yeah, this is great. Thank you, guys. So let's see. How have you seen students balance healthcare club involvement and being interested in healthcare but also with exploring other industries early in the MBA? - I think that's a great question that we've actually been discussing with kind of the co-presidents of other professional clubs, trying to figure out a good way to encourage a little bit more of that cross industry exploration earlier, at least for healthcare club. And it sounds like a majority of the other clubs, you don't necessarily have to, well no matter what, you don't have to go to every event, which I think is helpful. You're welcome to sign up for these clubs, you don't have to pay any extra. So being on their email list at least knowing what's going on in the club, I think is really helpful. Every club does similar, well most clubs do like a similar kind of lifeline series. They all call it something different, but being able to like just sign up and at least get the information from each of the clubs earlier versus waiting until December, January, February, I think is really helpful. - Absolutely. - I think well said. And I think a lot of it, like it's you can ask to have conversations and a lot of people are going to be really willing to help and give you their 2 cents. Obviously I work with the healthcare club but have a financey background slash internship and so I have talked to people more interested in finance as well about my experiences and what that was like. So it's just really kind of like asking to have that conversation type of thing so that you can learn more about what the different nuances are between these industries that start to meld a little bit towards the middle. - And I'll even say that the club has done a good job of trying to host some cross club events. So for example, we just had a club event where it was the healthcare club and the venture cap or private capital club, private capital club held a joint event on venture capital within healthcare companies and had some venture capital professionals

who were working at large payers, large providers, you know, talk about what their thought process. There was a diagnostics company. So just talk about what their thought process was as they chose sort of this very niche path within healthcare but was also very relevant to the students interested in the private capital club. So that's another way that this can, that dual exploration can happen. I want to make sure we get to at least one more. Here's a good one. So they heard your mention of the conference and the symposium and they want to know if those are two different events or if it's the same event. So can you talk a little bit about the difference between those two events and what their purposes are. - Two events. So one is in the fall, spring. Symposium in the fall is kind of a, so you are possibly considering a career in healthcare. Here is a bunch of different types of roles and verticals that you could possibly consider. I think we went down a sort of marketing day in the life, a finance day in the life healthcare consulting and- - Like an operations type. - Yeah. - Strategy - And, oh, the intern panel as well. - Oh yes. - Like what the internship was actually like for second years that had done it. With that we also tried to focus in on like what is pharma marketing versus payer provider marketing? What is that same difference for a finance role? And so that way people could get a sense of just the very wide breadth of different things that people are able to do under this big, big healthcare umbrella. The conference is, is very different. It's much, it tends to be much more about a specific series of topics that are just kind of relevant in the industry. So this year we're trying to put together panels on the difficulties of commercialization with cell and gene therapy. Talking about recent trends in licensing R&D out of emerging markets. What are a few other topics that were? Oh, changes in policy that are happening at both the federal and state level. Anything that I missed there. - Care delivery sort of changes and how the sort of world of digital health might be affecting that. I will say there's the difference in timing is sort of mirrors your availability as first years. So in the fall the symposium is geared to help you understand what you need to know as you are about to begin this recruiting journey. It's helpful to have an understanding of the breadth of healthcare careers. In the spring, there is less of an emphasis on the recruiting because many students may have already found the roles that they're hoping to do for their summer internship. And so instead it's focused on helping you learn about really interesting things that are happening in this space. Okay. Do we have time for one more? All right. I am going to ask, here's one follow up question. With booming of AI, are there any learning resources to combine healthcare with AI? And this is actually a, a great question that really dovetails with what we last, last said. - I think so in terms of actual course offerings, there's always kind of conversations about how to incorporate AI. A lot of our classes are starting to, instead of having a specific AI class, like we're bringing AI into different classes. We're not necessarily having an AI panel this year for conference. But, just kind of in general involving AI and how to utilize it in your job, in your everyday life and how to best utilize the tools that are going to be out there. - Yeah, I would say it's a really helpful tool in recruiting when it comes to understanding what companies do. You could have it just write a two paragraph summary of like, what does Eli Lilly focus on in terms of the diseases that they target? What is the status of different companies

like different payers, market share in Medicare advantage. Those are just like, kind of like specific but like types of examples that you could ask if you wanted to get a better sense of like how to break down the industry so that you're more informed about the industry as a whole. - Yeah, I think that it's bleeding into all of the things, right? It came up in Lifeline, it has come up in the conference, in the symposium. I know actually a number of the symposium speakers talked about how they were incorporating this into their jobs. And then I know many of the faculty, I think every class has some component of how AI is interacting. So it's not like there's an AI class with healthcare. All of the healthcare classes address some amount of it. And so it's no longer a separate thing. It's now just becoming part of all the things. Yeah. - All right. Let's see if I missed any here. So have either of you done the Duke Health program? Because we have a question here on working with Duke Hospital and if you haven't I'm happy to take this one. - I have not. - Okay. So the question is, you know, is there any work with the Duke University Hospital and what sorts of experiences are available to students to learn? And I will say that Fuqua does have a course called the Duke University Hospital Experiential Learning Practicum. For short, it's called DUHELP. And that is an opportunity to have a chance to work on a practicum at the hospital to learn from a preceptor at the hospital, work on a project of real importance that the hospital does value. It's a really interesting class. I will say it's a little bit competitive, so you do have to apply to get in, you can talk to the Center for Health Sector Management as they are the ones who manage that class. But it really is an interesting way to get a chance to learn from the hospital. We have also had in the past, historically, some alumni who have gone to work at the hospital and so there are connections there that you can network and speak with once you're a student. So there's lots of opportunities to learn and potentially opportunities if that's where you hope to go someday. It's not something that we see every year, but it absolutely is somewhere that people have gone. I think that might be everything that we had today. So thank you so much for joining us. I'll give one minute for any last questions. All right. I think that's it. - Thanks, everyone. - Thank you, guys.