SMG Kicks Off the Year with the All Grad School Mixer!

Post by:
Maya Tatsuno

MBA/MPH in Health Policy and Management, 2013

What happens when you get leaders across BU graduate programs and campuses together to plan an event?  Over 800 RSVPs across 5 different graduate programs; as well as collaboration, communication and endless networking opportunities among students who bare the BU crest to professionally excel and find ways to create value for the world.  In our increasingly pluralistic world faced with challenging financial and resource constraints, there is a rising need for inter-disciplinary problem solving and collaboration.  The first step towards getting there is creating a space that encourages BU students to meet and interact. 

On Friday, October 12th students from BU’s Graduate School of Management (SMG), School of Public Health (SPH), Graduate School of Medical Sciences (GMS), School of Dental Medicine (SDM) and School of Medicine (MED) met, ate and engaged in dialogue at Boston’s Gypsy Bar. It was a great turnout! For the first time this year, student councils from each of the schools met with each other and talked about upcoming events. Student governments from SMG, SPH and GMS subsidized food for the event. Students filled out nametags to identify themselves and the school they were representing. For the next four hours there was chatting, eating and eventually dancing among BU’s graduate students.

Spearheading the event were student leaders [positioned from left to right]: Maya Tatsuno (MBA’13), Kate Goodmon (GMS ’15), Emily Rath (MPH ’13), Taiwo Odusanya (MPH ’13), Neil Yajnik (MS/MBA ’13) and Dana Connolly (MBA ’13) [not pictured]. Planning began during the summer and resulted in weekly meetings and commitments from organizers to best represent the desires of their student bodies. Coordinating the event was no easy feat, but it was well worth it!

So you ask, what was it worth? I could attempt to calculate an ROI, but you would be missing the point. Graduate students pursuing an education are different than undergraduates. We do not get thrown into orientation together or shared dorms, which force us to interact. Some of us are career or industry switchers, while others pursue a planned path to get the right certification or skills to be successful in their line of work. A good percentage of our student bodies work part-time, have families or have their 5-year plan laid out. The students who attended this specific event will become fine clinicians, scientists, educators, policy-makers or businessmen and women, yet we could go through our whole graduate experience without once interacting with a student from another BU program.

As a future alumna of BU, I’d like to look back on my 6000-mile move as the best opportunity for me to hone my passion and skills, discover new career opportunities, build a network of diverse and talented people, and become a proud representative of the BU brand. There is no doubt that in my personal quest to find cost-effective solutions for delivering quality healthcare that I’m going to work on a team of stakeholders with expertise in the various fields represented at this event. So you ask, what was it worth? My answer is: A sense of pride and a sense of belonging to a brighter, greater, more cohesive BU community.

Maya Tatsuno is a 2^nd year MBA/MPH student concentrating in Health Policy and Management, and with experience in health plan operations and consulting.  Maya was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and so she spends most of her time in the winter months trying to find warm nooks with sunlight.