How did Sarah develop her career further in the health sector with an MBA from Cambridge? What did she hope to get out of her MBA? What was the most impactful about her Cambridge MBA year?
Before the MBA, I was working in surgery in the National Health Service here in the UK, specifically at Addenbrooke’s and Papworth Hospital, which are two incredible leading academic hospitals in Cambridge. I’ve always wanted to do an MBA. It’s just always been late in me.
I think it’s partly it’s a North American thing that it’s part of our life cycle and our career that at some point, we undertake this journey of re-investigating our skills. I think within medicine and surgery, it’s particularly useful in understanding how leadership
Decisions get made in your organisation and how they could be made better. People had mentioned the Cambridge MBA to me because it has such a focus on technology and healthcare, just because of what is emergent within Cambridge University and all of the pharmaceutical companies within Cambridge.
It was also appealing for me because I could keep my links with the hospitals and the researchers in Cambridge very live. It was nice because doing this MBA, I could bring together different domains of my life.
And I could bring interesting people together in a room in a way that led to really fascinating conversations about research and things I’m interested in. So, that was something that was very unique that I don’t think would have happened really at most other universities.
I think the best thing about the programme here is that you really are embedded within the wider university. It’s a very holistic experience because the MBA is part of it, but then another part of it is your immersion in the wider university and your college and everything that can bring.
I got a lot from that, which I was in no way expecting. The Cambridge experience goes far beyond what we learned just in the classroom. I really wanted to learn more about entrepreneurship because I didn’t understand elements, like how you build a financial model or how you size a market.
I went into the entrepreneurship concentration to develop that further. I chose something that would be a stretch, and I’m glad I did. My GCP was basically using my existing knowledge in a new context. I did a healthcare M and A project with Jefferies, which is an American investment bank in London,
And the focus was on digital therapeutics and digital health. It was interesting because it showed again that when you go where you’re scarce, you can bring this tremendous resource, which feels like very basic to you, but people really value. One thing which really distinguishes Cambridge University, it’s all about putting structure
On things that are otherwise formless. And by doing that, you really can quickly gain mastery over a project you’re doing. The second thing, it’s all about data. It’s all about using data. How do you collect data? How do you harvest important insights from data, the research side, with all of the science,
The technology that’s developed here? It’s also very true in the MBA. It’s very structure-driven, it’s very data-driven. That’s I think what you really get from a Cambridge degree is that analytical way of forming questions and putting parameters on things, so that you can evaluate them pretty thoroughly.
And I found that trend that’s a way of thinking and a polishing of my thinking that’s going to translate to multiple environments having done a degree here.