Andrea Gets Schooled

Guess who made the cut for the SFU EMBA?
Me! I MADE THE CUT! (cue relief/elation/gratitude/fist pumping).

I was thrilled, and incredibly grateful for the encouragement and support I received throughout the application process.

In July, we sent summer pre-program prep. There were many housekeeping tasks, one of which was to introduce ourselves to our cohort using online discussion function within SFU’s digital platform.

The roster was posted, and I was thrilled – my eyes darted through the list as I recalled feelings of first-day-of-school jitters.

The thing that I was most excited about: I didn’t recognize a single name on the list of 45 students!

Backgrounds of some students in the SFU EMBA 2022-2024 cohort:

• Mechanical & Civil Engineers
• Educators with experience in elementary, highschool, and post-secondary
• Law enforcement officers and others with military experience
• Operations leaders in companies like Pedalheads, PetValu, railway companies, and IT
• A Physician running a practice focusing on longevity
• Accountants
• Directors of sales and marketing in
• Investment bankers
• Commercial real estate managers
• Strategic planners across various industries
• Social Entrepreneur & non-profit leaders
• and many, many more whom you’ll get to know in the coming posts

We met in Whistler for our first retreat weekend (more on that in next post). Many of our initial conversations were facilitated by our Leadership course professor, Dr. Jeffrey Yip. We went real deep, real quick. And apart from being highly experienced in their fields, it was clear that my cohort-mates are super ‘switched on’, open, well-spoken, and kind. They’re striving forward in their careers, [somehow] raising families, and most importantly: all express a desire to learn.

There’s a different and palpable energy in a group of mature adults who consciously choose to incorporate a major time-consuming, stressful, and expensive program into their already-full lives.

How does this tie into my work?

One of my major motivations for pursuing a graduate-level business program is to make new friends in different industries. By default, most of my friends in the lower mainland are physiotherapists since I moved to Vancouver for Physio School.

Making new adult friends is healthy (and hard to do!). And if that was my only goal, I could have done that through other avenues. But this intense program allows me to cross paths with leaders in other industries while building my business acumen – two major areas I want to grow in!

The ScoliClinic is working to fill the large gap of providing non-surgical treatments to people with scoliosis, and it’s taken a great amount of work by many, many talented and smart people to build TSC operations to be the organization that it is today. Now that I’m not as involved in the day-to-day operations, I can work towards making an impact in the area that I think will be the most bang for my (energy) buck: creating bigger picture systems change to improve the lives of people living with scoliosis.

What might that look like? Here are some BHAGs for you:

• Update school curriculum for healthcare providers like Physicians, RMTs, OTs, & Physios etc to include development, assessment, and treatment options for scoliosis (we only spent 15 mins on it in Physio school!)
• Re-instate school screening – public scoliosis screening programs for highschoolers were cut in the 80s; as a result, many teenagers don’t catch their developing scoliosis until the curve has progressed
• Develop a widely-accepted referral and treatment pathway for British Columbia. It’s currently the wild WILD west; some healthcare providers have scoliosis experience, some don’t; some believe in conservative care and some advise to wait-and-see without treatment. Some patients receive prompt referrals to surgeons and some stay in queues for years.
• Advocate for some sort of publicly funded treatment option, or develop a more accessible option for low-income families – currently only private services are available (and newsflash, scoliosis doesn’t only select the affluent)
• Spread awareness about the psycho-social-emotional aspects of scoliosis, and roles of social determinants in treatment outcomes – patients’ lived experiences go far beyond their spinal X-Ray image, and we want to encourage medical professionals to make our practices more inclusive, accessible, relational, and trauma-informed.

I know – these are goals that may not be accomplished in my career, or even my lifetime. But I believe a mission needs to be so big that it feels unattainable – it’s what keeps me going.

In order to work towards these lofty goals, and even to intelligently break down the preliminary steps required to work towards them, I need a broader understanding of all the factors at play in the current systems.

Personally, I have much to learn about philanthropy and the non-profit sector; how government healthcare spending policies are established, how curriculum content is determined, how education funding is allocated; which financing strategies may help us grow our operations, how to demonstrate financial modelling and forecasting; how to make good decisions, how to inspire change, how to ensure we’re championing inclusion and diversity at every step of the way…. the list is endless.

Alone, I do not possess the knowledge (nor the self-generated motivation) to work towards these goals; much of that ambition, energy, and ideas will come from crossing paths with people ‘in their genius’. The intensity and design of SFU’s EMBA puts me in close proximity with incredible people who will inevitably spread their wisdom and experience to those around them.

This lights my fire, inspires my thinking, and ultimately gives power to my team’s efforts to make greater change.

– Andrea

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Join me in the classroom of life!