After consulting in the healthcare field for several years after college, Shravya Kidambi decided that she needed an MBA to progress further in her career. She wanted to learn more about the area of healthcare as well as explore her long-term goal of working for a global healthcare nonprofit.
“I hoped to find a business school that offered plenty of hands-on learning opportunities and as many experiences as possible in the healthcare and nonprofit fields so that I could better determine what I enjoy and where I want to go after graduation,” she says. When she visited UCLA Anderson, she knew she had found the right place.
Not only did UCLA offer a concurrent degree program with Anderson and the School of Public Health, it also offered ample opportunities to explore her areas of interest in classes, clubs, volunteer programs, and internships.
Now in her last year of the concurrent degree program, Kidambi – who is originally from India but grew up in Abu Dhabi -- has taken advantage of many of those opportunities. On the club front, she’s served in a leadership role for the Healthcare Business Association and as copresident of Challenge for Charity, the largest MBA-run charitable organization in the world. Last year, Anderson students in the club volunteered over 5,000 hours and raised over $105,000 for the Special Olympics, Project Echo, and Junior Achievement.
She also volunteered to spend three weeks at UCLA’s Medical Center in the Radiation and Oncology Department where she analyzed clinic room utilization and patient wait times. Afterward, Kidambi began an internship for the UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Healthcare Executive Program, which gave her an opportunity to visit South Africa and Ghana to help teach strategy to managers at HIV/AIDS non-profits.
And through her Applied Management Research project (AMR) supervised by Prof. Victor Tabbush, she visited Tanzania where her team researched ways to address the need for more surgical staff in sub-Saharan Africa. “I talked to doctors in rural hospitals, government officials and patients about what has worked in terms of providing incentives for doctors and alternative ways to address the problem,” she says, noting that her team’s findings were presented at a surgical conference in Kenya.
This past summer, she went to Switzerland to intern for the World Health Organization, studying how establishing public-private partnerships can deal with health security issues such as the radiation leaks in Japan.
“If you know what you want to do and look for those opportunities at Anderson, you’ll find them,” says Kidambi. “Anderson is about trying new things, thinking outside of the box, and not always sticking to a pre-existing structure. I’ve had leadership opportunities, hands-on learning experiences, and internships all in the areas of healthcare and nonprofits – I’ve gotten everything I hoped for out of this program and much more.”
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