<p>hello everyone this is Cole from the American Journal of healthc care strategy and here with me this evening is enin enin please introduce yourself my name is enin Caro I recently graduated from the George Washington University um with my masters in health administration I am currently the administrative fellow in the Pathology Department at Columbia University Irving Medical Center [Music] so happy to have you on this evening you have such a great amount of experience and you're our first fellow from Colombia so we're so excited to talk about that it's a very renowned school and a renowned uh City so it's very interesting so you went to George Washington University you're going to be finishing up this may Right congratulations on that it's a great program how did you like it yeah I really loved my experience at GW I especially loved my cohort we were able to kind of bond and get really close working on school projects and also hanging outside of the classroom as well and exploring the DC area so um I can say that I really loved it excellent yeah the DC is uh it's definitely different than anywhere else they have the cleanest Subways um it's so you started off at University of Pittsburgh right are you from the Pittsburgh area what led you to go to that school no so I am from New Jersey and when I was deciding on where to go for my undergrad degree I wanted to be somewhere far away and in a city and so in my search I went to visit the University of Pittsburgh fell in love with the campus and everything and ended up there so it was about a 5H hour drive from my house in New Jersey so it was a pretty good distance and everything good that's I did the same thing when I started undergrad I want to be a bit far from my parents and you know experience something different uh so that you've actually traveled kind of a lot right you've traveled to London for one of your uh internships you've traveled to Minnesota so would you say that traveling is something that you're kind of passionate about yeah I definitely love going new places and everything I would say that before going into my undergrad degree some of my cousins have studied abroad and so they told me that it's something that you have to do when you're in college and everything so my second year of my sophomore year I applied to go to London and that that's where I was able to um both study AB Broad and do um an international internship so it was really great that is super cool it gives you a good you know a wider perspective on things that's really neat so one of the things I I wondered looking at it is it seems like you know you work a little bit you've done some stuff in Supply Chain management and then you went and got the mha what was the kind of change and why did you choose Supply Chain management and then why did you get the mha what was going on at that time yeah so I think in my undergrad degree going into like my freshman year and everything I wasn't exactly sure what specific area I wanted to concentrate in the business school and then I took a supply chain class and we were talking about optimization and laning sigma and like I guess kind of streamlining operations and really pequ my interest and then also I feel like at that time supply chain was sort of a new upand cominging hot major so I decided I wanted to learn more and um decided to go the supply chain route as my undergrad major and then from there I knew that I wanted to work in healthcare but I wasn't necessarily sure how I could contribute the skills and kind of experiences that I had being more on the business side and then my one friend from home actually told me that she was applying to mha programs and then I started looking into that and realizing that oh there's more to healthcare than just the clinical side and everything um so then I started doing my research and I really liked gw's program because of the kind of not mandatory but encouraged Fellowship aspect of it um I knew that going into a master's program and trying to transition into Healthcare wasn't going to necessarily be easy because I didn't have that public health background that most people have going into their mha programs so I kind of knew from the GetGo that I wanted to do a administrative Fellowship to kind of get my foot in the door and really understand what it is to um work in a Health Care Organization that makes a lot of sense I know it's I know even people with experience in some different areas of healthcare it's also that experience in like the business side of things so I think that I've heard that a lot where the Fellowship really helps to kind of target people and helps them figure out exactly where they fit in I noticed that you did a supply chain internship with Alina Health was that something that you just like randomly found when you're looking for internships because it kind of seems like it's perfectly made for your prior experience yeah honestly I think it was kind of random how I found it I literally just like was looking up Healthcare internships online and I've been to Minnesota before and when I interviewed vied with the team at Alina I really liked the culture that was there and then I also wanted to kind of see how my background in supply chain could potentially fit into Healthcare and so that internship was a really great opportunity for me to kind of learn and see the importance of having um lean operations and having that like like I mentioned before the streamlined process of getting all of your supplies all of your materials and everything when you need them at the right place at the right time and so I also feel that obviously the pandemic really disrupted every single supply chain operation not necessarily just in healthcare so it was interesting to kind of see the aftermath of that and see kind of how they were trying to bounce back and pivot working with different suppliers and different I guess like medical sales organiz definitely that seems very very interesting because we've you know all heard on the news everything going on during that time and then how they were trying to kind of rebuild the supply chains and then so after that towards the end of your mha you started applying for the fellowships of course can I ask how many you applied to oh I definitely applied to over 10 and then can I ask you know why did you apply for the one at Colombia what stuck out to you about that one yeah definitely so at the time when I was applying to fellowships I knew that I wanted to to be in kind of a major metropolitan area so I was really only applying to fellowships in DC Chicago and New York and so obviously being from New Jersey ideally I was trying to kind of end up back in my home area in the city and so when I applied I also liked the aspect that I was able to kind of go and do a deep dive in a specific Department within the organ Columbia's organization they're actually changing it up this year and so now the two fellows that are coming on to Colombia are going to have a more uh I guess wider breath of experiences because they'll be able to rotate throughout different departments in within Colombia but I think for me the interview aspect that I had and the connections that I made during my interview process really drew me to Colombia I really liked the culture at the pathology and cell biology Department I think me and my preceptor her name's Joanne I think we clicked during the interview and that kind of led me to um rank them higher in my fellowship search and everything nice that that's uh I've heard that a few times how that interview can make a really big impact on getting a fellow a lot of people worry about this and we don't need to you know have any specific numbers but I know from physician fellows in New York City it can be really challenging because of the the expense to pay for rent to pay for food what is it like as an administrative fellow is that something you've had to really worry about a lot you know what would you tell some of the other fellows in the same situation looking for programs in New York City yeah definitely so I know that my salary right now at Colombia is a little lower than what the fellows who are incoming next year will have they'll be around the same like market rate as other organizations such as I think NYU and northwell so so I think for me it might be a little different kind of trying to prioritize what I want to spend my money on and everything I think one aspect especially being in a big city specifically in New York it's really important to try and find roommates I'm currently living with two of my really close friends from high school and so we're obviously paying less than someone who would be um living in the same area as us in a one-bedroom apartment by themselves so I think it's really important to just be cognizant about what money you're spending on because it's so easy to walk outside go grab a coffee grab a snack grab dinner and then you come home and somehow you spend $100 I think being cognizant about what you're spending your money on is definitely a helpful tip regardless of if you're in the city or if you're in somewhere where the cost of living is a little cheaper that makes a lot of sense so not as Loose as you know with the with the money as some fellowships you know in the cheaper area are but it's not anything crazy yeah that's nice and then another question that's kind of a personal question you know some people like myself are wondering is New York City worth the extra you know tightness that you have to have do you think it's it's been worth working in the city have you really enjoyed it 100% yeah there's so many great things about New York first it's such a walkable City even if you're so like I'm living downtown and there's still so many places I've been been here since July and there's so many places still in my neighborhood that I haven't necessarily gotten a chance to explore so what really just goes to show how big the city really is and how many new opportunities and new experiences you can have and it's really hard to kind of fit everything into a year CU I'm so far guaranteed only a year in New York as my fellowship ends this coming June and well I guess yeah I'll ask this I guess so are you you looking to stay in the city then and or stay with Colombia even after your fellowship yeah definitely I think going into my fellowship I didn't necessarily realize or have the experience obviously of working in an academic Medical Center but my experiences so far I really like how everyone and the culture is really um really puts a heavy emphasis on learning and professional development and just trying new things so I think definitely if I have an opportunity to stay at Colombia I would take it um but I'm not necessarily tied down and only looking at Colombia I'm also looking at other um healthc Care Systems within this area and then also potentially like maybe back in DC too excellent so you're trying to keep your options open there and you know so what are some of the projects that you've worked on and what are a few that you've really enjoyed the most yeah definitely so I can think of two that really stand out to me the first one is is a process Improvement project that I've been working on with one of the service the transplant service lines and here we were um kind of just like optimizing and changing their workflow so that it was more automated and less on the manual side and this experience really kind of allowed I guess it allowed me to kind of bridge what I've learned in my undergrad degree with process Improvement also with my grad degree at G W and then kind of I guess merge that with learning how to work with other people work with senior pis work with lab teex work with also the um my preceptor who's the da and CFO so it really I guess kind of showed me a br a broader picture of what it is to do uh change management um process Improvement project management and how you really kind of have to have I guess have a vision and really be able to kind of articulate and back up why you're creating this change because obviously if you're changing someone's workflow not everyone's going to be 100% on board with it as people are used to doing things a certain way and so it really showed me um and allowed me to kind of practice my change management skills so I think that one project is um pretty cool because we were actually able to implement the change um and we had the go live date in January so I feel like it's not um necessarily like always usual where people are able to show the vision of what they're trying to do actually implement the change and then see what happens after it so I feel like I got pretty lucky in that regard and then I guess my second project that I'm working on still is a data analysis project of the department as a whole and so basically I'm tracking like some Dei metrics about like Sal tenure rids comp uh I I already said compensation turnover career progression and everything so I've been able to kind of I guess like dig around in that data analyze it showcase Trends and everything and I'm actually I showed it to the department chair who was going to use some of the metrics and everything to help uh his initiatives I guess in June when he shows off his new um like slide deck of initiatives excellent those both sound very very exciting how has that January Gove when did it go well it did we did have to push it back a couple of days but honestly so far since then we haven't had any major hiccups with the system obviously there were a couple um starting out and everything but we've had a couple follow-up meetings and everything and everything seems to be going well so far so knock on wood but um yeah congratulations that's excellent what are some areas that you're thinking of of looking at you know you said you were looking in the DC in the New York area what are some you know job titles or or job departments that you're interested in working in so I think I'm definitely interested in strategy I think I would also say I guess like project management process Improvement jobs I'm not necessarily specifically tied down to those specific titles I would be open also to I guess like apply for practice manager roles or like super visor roles and everything but I think more so I'm looking for strategy and like project management nice those are some hot areas right now I know a lot of the fellows they tend to go in those areas I like process Improvement a lot and of course I've been getting into strategy more now you know we're the Journal of healthc care strategy so I'm I found that I need to educate myself on what that means but those are both very very popular areas for a lot of fellows so I want to ask you you've you've accomplished a project from beginning to end successfully and your career is also like a project as well that you've done very well at accomplishing starting from undergrad through grad school through these internships and then now you're do making you know big big moves in your your fellowship what are some challenges you've overcome and what have you learned from that that you can share with you know students earlier on like myself what you know what could I do to succeed like you have definitely so I think one personal challenge that stands out to me that I'm still kind of struggling with is I guess impostor syndrome and feeling like oh I'm just a fell like I I just started at this organization I don't have the skills or like the knowledge to kind of make these higher level decisions to um like senior or executive leaders but I've really learned um throughout my time at Colombia so far that one colia as it as an organization really does appreciate New Perspective new ideas obviously just coming straight from grad undergrad to grad school to the fellowship I feel I guess in the back of my head it's like oh you don't have that much work experience but we really do have a bunch of different experience from past internships to what we're learning in our classes and everything and so I think I would tell someone who was in my position last year that to be confident in the decisions that making to just have an idea and to kind of own it and if you have the I guess knowledge and kind of like data if you have that to back up what you're trying to present then there really is no need to feel that impostor syndrome definitely that is really really good advice for the impostor syndrome is having that data to back it up I was told I I was struggling with that a bit as well in some of these meetings I was you know my ideas I would come out with weren't always taken and one of my mentors said well you need to have better data to back it up I'm like well I have the data I'm like well why aren't you showing the data and so that's that's very good advice too but you know you do have a lot of experience especially compared to someone just starting out you know if you think about yourself five years ago you've come a long way so that that's very good advice um how is the the networking and support B at Columbia that's one of the questions that I've been asking people do you feel like you have a really good connection with your preceptor yeah yeah so at colia personally I feel like the culture and specifically like the networking and alumni culture are really uh good so my cohort has nine fellows including me the past cohort I think had a similar number and so I feel like if I so for example I wanted to Shadow a practice manager and so I reached out to the fellowship coordinator who also happens to be a past fellow and he put me in touch with someone who is like a fellow Alum and I was able to Shadow her me and like I mentioned before Joanne have a really good working relationship I asked her if I was able to Shadow a surgery because that's something that I definitely wanted to experience obviously working in a health system um and she was able to talk to her kind of network team and we were able to get me to Shadow a breast surgeon and so I feel that if I need any help I can always turn to my current fellows or my past fellows or even my classmates from GW so I feel like the networking aspect in healthcare is definitely something that is really important to kind of Thrive and like grow I guess I definitely agree and it does sound like that's really nice that they've you know enabled you to Shadow different people and you've had those opportunities so that is excellent I really appreciate your time we could probably talk for a lot longer but I really do appreciate you sharing all this information with us and I hope that you'll consider coming back on again as you get you know your new role and as you you finish up your fellowship yeah definitely</p>