Summary

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is 40,000+ members strong worldwide, and provides a sense of community to women who may feel isolated in their engineering studies or career due to a lack of gender diversity. Karen Horting is the Executive Director & CEO of the organization, and shares a lot of great information on the engineering field, the services provided by SWE, and how members and affiliated employers can benefit from being a part of the organization.

How the Society of Women Engineers is Empowering Women

I’m so pleased to have on the show Karen Horting, Executive Director & CEO of the Society of Women Engineers. Karen worked in marketing after earning her bachelors in biology at Northern Illinois University, and she earned her MBA from the Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School in 2000. She served as Marketing Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Director of Strategic Planning for the New York Academy of Sciences before coming to the society of Women Engineers in 2004. She became Executive Director and CEO in 2014.

What is the Society of Women Engineers, and can you give me a little background as to its founding and history? [1:28]

It is a professional organization for women in engineering. Our mission is to empower women to achieve their full potential in careers as engineers and leaders, expand the image of engineering and technical professions as a positive force in improving the quality of life, and to demonstrate the value of diversity and inclusion. We have been around since 1950, helping women succeed and advance in their careers. We have a little over 40,000 members worldwide, and that includes girls pursuing engineering careers, seasoned professionals, and women in retirement.

The organization came about because women were very much the minority in the workplace and engineering school, and didn’t have a voice, so forming their own organization was a great way to support each other, have a network, and help each other learn and grow and succeed in the profession.

Why do you think women are still under-represented in the STEM fields and in engineering? [5:08]

Research shows us the #1 factor is unconscious bias. A study we did in 2016 that focused on the workplace found that almost 40% of women engineers leave the engineering workforce by mid-career, and the #1 factor was the unconscious bias that affects things like hiring, promotion, and compensation. A lot of the work we do with our employer partners is talking about that and what they can do to make managers aware of unconscious bias and also best practices to be bias interrupters, to let women and other under-represented minorities succeed and advance in their organization. This bias exists in K-12 education and at university level as well, where it’s perceived that engineering is not a career for women, or women are not interested in things that involve math and science, and that just isn’t true. Women do exceptionally well in AP courses in math and science, and well through middle school show interest in innovation. I can’t think of a career that is more impactful than engineering, because it touches almost everything in our daily lives – it’s problem solving, and math and science are some of the tools used in that, but it’s really about improving lives.

Summary

Lolita Wood-Hill has been working in the field of pre-med advising for over 25 years, so it’s safe to say she knows the ins and outs of the medical school application process better than most. In this podcast, Lolita gives advice on how to make yourself the most enticing applicant to medical school possible, starting as early as freshman year of college. She lays out a timeline of activities, including coursework, research, and clinical experience that are an essential medical school application plan. Lolita also shares the realities of the application process, and how to prepare for it from an academic and financial perspective.

How to Plan Your Pre-Med Application Process

Our guest today, Lolita Wood-Hill, started her pre-med advising career in the early 1990s working for AAMC’s Summer Health Professions Education Program , which had a different name then. She then worked as Deputy Director for Premedical Studies and Prehealth Advising at CCNY and Hunter College. She arrived at YU and assumed the role of Director for Prehealth Advisement in September 2010. In that role, Lolita provides academic and career guidance for all students interested in health profession careers.

Three and four years before planning to start med school, what’s a successful applicant’s timeline? [2:44]

First-year students need to understand about grades. The transition from high school to college can be tough, so it is important for them to find tutors, to find upperclassmen that can give them info on classes, and to make sure they know how to access money for books, for example. Freshmen struggle with this, and if that transition is really bumpy then all of a sudden the first year of college turns out to be a C in Bio, a C+ in Calculus, and you are climbing uphill.

First-year students need to think about how to transition to college successfully and also what they will need three years later – they will need letters of recommendation, so start looking at professors. Who do you like the most? Who do you have the best rapport with? And continue those relationships so in two-three years you can ask for a letter of recommendation. Also, think about your interests outside of the classroom – look at clubs (though in the first semester no one should join a club, people should be focused on their grades) and extracurricular activities to participate in. When you apply, you need to have a robust resume, which should start the second semester of your first year.

Second-year students need to start thinking about research by the end of their sophomore year, thinking about summer research, doing it with a faculty member (so figuring out who you want to do research with), and overall figuring out where the research opportunities are. Students often don’t think about things until they are upon them, but they need to really think about their plan as soon as they are in the door. You only have three years that you are going to show to a medical school in your application, so you need to make the most of them.

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When do you recommend applicants start getting clinical exposure? [5:36]

That can start in freshman year.

Summary

Brian Hoffman started Nomad Credit to primarily work with international students in helping them find and secure student loans, car loans, health insurance, and more. What many don’t realize is how difficult it is to secure credit in the United States if you don’t already have U.S.-based products, many of which you don’t even have access to until you physically move to the country. Brian’s company provides a matching service based on the unique needs of his customers. For example, if you are in India looking to secure a student loan, Nomad helps you narrow down your options and find the best choice. As his business grows, he looks to expand in other countries, both with schools and lending partners.

Show Notes

How can Nomad Credit help an international student navigate the complex credit system in the United States?

Our guest today is Brian Hoffman, founder and CEO of Nomad Credit. Brian earned his bachelors in finance from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in 2012. He began his full-time professional career in trading for about two years and then became an analyst for a company dedicated to helping clients optimize the value of data assets. In late 2015 he founded Nomad Credit, a financial marketplace for those underserved by other marketplaces, specifically non-permanent U.S. residents.

Let’s start with the basics. What is Nomad Credit? What services and/or products does it provide? [2:22]

It’s a platform for international students to help them obtain credit, find insurance products, etc. We don’t provide the loans, but we connect them to partners of ours who do. We also help them with some admissions questions.

How did you come up with the idea behind Nomad? What’s the back story? [3:01]

We wanted to get into traditional student lending like SoFi, but realized we needed to have a competitive advantage or niche to compete, so we decided to transition away from traditional student lending to this niche business. What we realized is that someone coming to the U.S. for the first time needs all the credit products – student loans, credit cards, car loans, insurance, and we decided to go that route.

What’s been your biggest challenge in launching Nomad? [4:30]

There are two. The first is cultural – there are different ways of doing business with lenders in other parts of the world. The second is technology, both for consumers who have never seen an online loan application, and also for lending partners who have never put their loan application online.

What is the biggest or most distinctive benefit of getting a loan through Nomad as opposed to just searching the internet or getting one in their home country? [6:49]

For a long time that’s how students got loans – in their home countries. What people don’t realize is that interest rates are often drastically higher in other parts of the world. In India, for example, student loans are going out at 12-13%, and in the U.S. students can get interest rates in the 4-8% range. Also, if you get a loan in India, it has to be transferred, and there are big FX fees on that, so with a loan from here you don’t have those fees as well, so it tends to be much more cost effective to get the loan here.

What are some of the challenges faced by international students when they try to get student loans?

Show Summary

Katie Luby will be graduating this spring from the MIT Sloan Fellows program, and can’t say enough good things about the experience. Coming from Salesforce, and with an anthropology and design educational background, business school was a whole new animal. Katie feels her experience at MIT Sloan Fellows will uniquely enhance her work as a human-centered design practitioner, especially in the areas of technology implementation, innovation, and leadership. While she has gained many tools to help her in her work, the most meaningful aspect of her time at MIT Sloan has been the relationships she has developed with the other Fellows. With a diverse cohort from all around the world, the exposure to new ways of thinking and working has been unparalleled. Add in the fact that her 8 ½ year old daughter has been with her throughout the experience, and she wouldn’t change a thing.

Show Notes

Our guest today, is Katie Luby, MIT Sloan Fellow, MBA student, and Innovation and Transformation Director, Design Architect at Salesforce. Katie started out studying movies, earned her master’s in design from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and worked in tech for companies like Motorola, Sapient, and Razorfish before landing at Salesforce, where she has been since 2013, except for her current stay in Boston as an MIT Sloan Fellow.

Can you tell us about your background? Where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [2:10]

I am from Chicago, born and raised in Evanston. It is a great city to be in, with lots of swimming, bike riding, great culture and museums. During most of my free time I try to get outside and enjoy some of the cultural offerings. In Boston there is also great culture, and a little smaller city which is nice, and I am really looking forward to spring right now since the weather has been “interesting.”

You started out studying film and cinematography and then did a Masters in Design. How did you go from the movies to design? [3:17]

I feel like I have a pretty windy path, but also feel like everything I have done really has built on itself. In undergrad I studied anthropology, so I’ve always been interested in the study of people and behaviors and culture. Coming out of school, applied anthropology didn’t really exist in the field – you really had to go to a tribe to study, we really couldn’t study ourselves, and between the time I graduated and then got a masters suddenly ethnography was being used as a tool with all sorts of design problems, business problems, cultural problems – so that fell into place. Between my undergrad and masters I worked on documentary films and film production. I spent some time in San Francisco and then came back to Chicago, working with a lot of really smart creative people in advertising. I worked in teams to make advertising ideas come alive, sourcing materials, building things, conceptualizing ideas in real form, dealing with budgets, and problem solving. I never considered myself a creative, but loved the idea of design and art direction looking to solve a problem. When I found the institute of design, one of just a few programs in the country that accepts people in their masters program without an undergrad degree in design, I learned theory and practice around how to solve problems with a design perspective. A hot topic now is design thinking, and it is really the perspective of who the users are and what the issue at hand is. Are we looking at the right problem? Coming up with creative and elegant solutions to meet that need?

Our guest today, Dr. Nadia Afridi earned her bachelors and MD in Canada and then did a residency in plastic surgery at Dalhousie University. She also earned her Executive MBA from Columbia in 2017.

Can you tell us about your background?  Where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:09]

I was born and raised in Canada, the only child of physicians who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, so I have been surrounded by medicine my whole life. As a result, I knew a lot about medicine and decided to pursue it and did most of my training in Canada. Once I did my residency I wanted to do my fellowship training with a doctor I admired, so I moved to Nashville, TN and worked for a year there, and then did another fellowship with a non-profit, traveling all over the world doing cleft lip, cleft palate, and burn reconstruction surgery for children. That was a hard year emotionally, but so satisfying to be able to help so tangibly.

You did your undergrad and medical education including a residency in plastic surgery in Canada. You then did you one year of sub-specialty training in the U.S., focusing on reconstructive and aesthetic breast surgery. You are now a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and associate fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Was it hard professionally to move to the U.S. from Canada? [2:56]

Compared to what many people who immigrated to the United States go through it was relatively easy. Almost all of my education was already recognized when I came south of the border. So it wasn’t like my MD wasn’t recognized. I didn’t have to redo any training, but anytime you make a major move to a new place without an established network it is somewhat challenging, but it was doable. It was more the practical, business aspects as opposed to the regulatory and educational ones.

What was hardest aspect of your medical education? [4:28]

That you spend so much time before you become even remotely employable, which is a bit daunting. A lot of people get exhausted just thinking about the path ahead of you. I just tried to take it step by step, and with staging, there is initially more classroom and then progressing to a clinical environment. Another one of the hardest parts is choosing your specialty and then of course getting into it.

Let’s turn to your experience as an EMBA student. Why did you want to add an MBA to your MD? [5:50]

I had been in practice here awhile in New York and it was going relatively well. In some ways I had reached a professional plateau, and yearned to learn something new and completely different from medicine, so I decided to see if I could meet the standards of admission to Columbia. I knew for sure I would be able to extract an ROI from the MBA degree by streamlining the way I ran my business, but also I thought long term I would be ready to move onto a different phase of my career, and the skills, network, and contacts from the MBA would serve me well at that point.

CBS offers 3 NY-based EMBA options (EMBA-NY Saturday, EMBA-NY: Fri/Sat; and EMBA Americas) Why did you choose what you chose? [7:47]

I chose the Fri/Sat program and probably wouldn’t have done the program if not for that option. Every second weekend you go to school all day Friday and Saturday. What I liked about that schedule was that I knew I would hav...

Our guest today is soon-to-be doctor Mary Tate and current 4th year medical student at Harvard Medical School. Mary graduated from Dartmouth in 2012 and has been at HMS since 2013. She was very active at Dartmouth and continued to be a change agent at HMS. In 2017 she earned her MPH at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, and by the end of the month, she’ll be Dr. Mary Tate.

Can you tell us about your background? Where you grew up? [1:29]

I was born and raised in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I am the youngest of eight children, and have 18 nieces and nephews, so there was always someone around, someone to learn from. I went to public schools that really valued the arts, so I was involved in the arts from a young age. I played violin starting in 4th grade and by middle school was doing theatre, putting on three productions a year. My high school did 10-12 shows a year, so I’ve never been a stranger to the stage, and it was a really big part of my upbringing. I also have a brother with severe intellectual disabilities who is eight year older than me, and one of my roles was as a caregiver to him, so I learned how to be there for someone else who needed it.

When you think back on the application process, what did you find most difficult? [5:57]

The personal statement, for a number of reasons. First, the drafting of it should take place over the course of months. Creating something that is trying to meet the word limit, tells about who you are, why you want to be a physician, and has a cohesive theme that feels unique is really challenging and requires a lot of reflection. I broke down when I started writing it because it sounded like what everyone else would be saying, like, “I want to be a doctor because I want to eliminate suffering.” I couldn’t say that! Over time I learned the more I continued to write the more I was able to anchor it with my experiences. What makes my story unique is sharing my life experiences and as a result why I want to alleviate suffering through medicine - why it makes sense. Additionally, I didn’t want to be a burden by asking others to read it, but you really need lots of people to read your drafts, ones who will give you the painful feedback you need to hear.

What would you have changed about your approach to it, looking back now? [9:40]

What helped me is starting really early. By the time I’d gotten to the point of applying I already knew that I needed to ask for help. That took time to feel comfortable with. I knew how to utilize the resources available to me. I don’t know if I would have done anything differently, but getting comfortable asking for help and being resourceful, if I hadn’t done that work - that is what I would want to tell people. So many people try to go it alone. There are a lot of people that can potentially help you out, so you should take advantage of that. I would make sure I did those things again. You need someone who is really close to you to read each draft to make sure your personality is showing through, and you need a grammar person, and a professor or others in academia to show when you have a draft you are proud of. And one last person to look again when you think it is done, and are ready to hit submit, just one more person who reads it for the very first...

Our guest today is Dr. Benjamin Chan, Associate Dean of Admissions and Idaho Affairs at the University of Utah's School of Medicine and host of the Talking Admissions & Med Student Life podcast. Dr. Chan earned his bachelors at Stanford and his MD at UUCOM. He then trained in General Psychiatry at George Washington University in DC.  He has also completed a fellowship in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, has an MBA from University of Utah and a Masters in Education from the University of Cincinnati. He is also an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and inpatient attending physician at the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Dr. Chan, can you give an overview of the Utah COM’s curriculum focusing on the more distinctive elements of the program? [2:20]

We are an allopathic medical school, which means we offer the MD degree, which is four years long. We are known for innovation, in particular trying new teaching techniques. TBL-based learning is new, and it’s essentially students teaching each other – they break off into small groups, do cases, debate, and learn.

We also have a bench-to-bedside bio innovation project. There was a question of how to take bench research to help patients more quickly, so we decided to break up students into multi-disciplinary teams, including other graduate students like in computer science, biology, or physics, and the teams interview and shadow doctors. We provide some lab space and startup money and they go back to their lab and brainstorm ideas and design prototypes. We have an annual gala when everyone comes together to present their designs, judges interview and play with prototypes, and there are winners – it’s essentially a science fair on steroids.

One winner a few years back is currently in stage 3 trials with a UV light that kills bacteria. It is a catheter that kills bacteria before you insert it into the skin, which could have huge implications, since you don’t always have the sterilization capability.

The curriculum is divided into four core areas that students participate in throughout their four years at UCOM: Service, Scholarship, Mentorship; Clinical medicine; Medical Sciences; and Medical Arts.  Clinical medicine and Medical Sciences are what most people think of when you talk about medical school. How do the other two areas play out in the Utah experience? [5:25]

Students learn a lot of hard facts – anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology. How does one take that information and communicate it with your patients? You can have all the clinical and scientific knowledge in the world, but if you can’t share it in a way that makes sense to your patients, that does you no good. So there is a science to medicine, and there’s also an art to it. We have medical humanities, so we talk about death and dying, how to interact with diverse patient populations, and how to deal with bioethical issues as they arise, which is incredibly important. With service, scholarship and mentorship, we pride ourselves on the fact that our students stay up-to-date on the latest news and research, so the vast majority participate in a research project of some sort. We also have a formalized mentorship program.

I noticed in reviewing your site and preparing for the call that there is a strong focus on “practice-based learning.” Can you describe that approach in the medical school setting? [11:26]

The first two years of med school are historically classroom-based, and then very clinically-based.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Kellee Scott. This is Kellee’s first time on AST, but she is no stranger to Accepted, having participated in our old online chats.

Kellee earned her bachelors in business at the University of Miami and worked in business for companies like Unilever and Ernst and Young. Then she became a Trojan through and through, joining the Marshall admissions team in 2001. She also earned her MBA at USC. In addition to her duties today as Senior Associate Director at Marshall, she has served on the Boards of the Forte Foundation and The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management.

Can you give an overview of the USC Marshall FT MBA program for those listeners who aren’t that familiar with it? Please focus on its more distinctive elements. [2:40]

The flexibility of the program is one aspect – we really are a “Make Your Own MBA.” We start with a pretty tight core but students start taking electives pretty early on in the program, to provide breadth and depth, and students are also welcome to take classes outside of Marshall.

Communications is part of the core, which is rare for MBA programs at this point. We feel it is a critical component for success - knowledge and expertise don’t matter if you can’t convey your ideas. In fact, The Bloomberg BusinessWeek jobs skills report named us as a school consulting companies love to come to because of our students’ great communications skills, and this will remain part of our core.

We also were the first school to require international travel as part of the core, so everyone at Marshall needs a passport since you will be going overseas. Additionally, we have an intensive case competition. Even if you are not going into consulting it helps with leadership and critical thinking skills, and allows you to apply things you are learning very quickly. Finally, we are the only MBA program that presents at the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), another major project where students present to CEOs of APEC.

When I think of Marshall’s strengths I think of entrepreneurship, media and entertainment, and global business, especially on the Pacific Rim. What else should I be thinking of and why? [5:55]

We have a very active tech club, and the tech industry is now 2nd to consulting for MBA hires. Being here in LA, which we call Silicon Beach, is great because of the tight start-up culture, which is very important to lots of MBAs. There has been lots of growth in the interest in gaming, and it has grown such that our Gaming Club was created as an offshoot of our Tech Club. Also, Business Analytics is part of our core. We were one of the first schools to add it, and we now have a new Masters in Business Analytics, and MBA students can take additional courses in that area as electives, or can concentrate in it if they like.

USC Marshall states that its four core values are: Transformational courage, collaborative ambition, impactful service, and unwavering integrity. How do those values influence admissions decisions? [7:49]

The wonderful thing about those values is they came from our students. As we look at applications in the admissions process we assess these values in different ways. With transformational courage, we are looking for applicants who transform and find ways to stretch themselves - constantl...

Warning: Our guest today has done so much that it’s going to be really hard to give his background succinctly, but here goes. Dr. Calvin Sun earned his bachelors in 2008 at Columbia where he held numerous leadership positions. In 2014, he graduated from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and served as graduating class president. Since 2014 he has been an ER resident at Montefiore and Jacobi Medical Centers and is also the Director of Resident Wellness at Jacobi.

In his non-existent spare time in medical school, he somehow managed to found and now runs The Monsoon Diaries, which he describes as “a blog-turned-travel company”. The Monsoon Diaries organizes flexible, budget trips and has gone to over 128 countries in the past six years. He is also a film-maker, popular speaker, and activist in the Asian American community.

Can you tell us about your background? Where you grew up? [2:26]

I was born and raised in Manhattan and was lucky to have parents who raised me in an environment where I was constantly learning and growing. In the interim of my youth my father died of a heart attack and my mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which led me to determining my path for myself earlier than expected, and that led me to medicine which I thankfully believe was a decision I made on my own rather than a decision made for me.

My father had wanted me to become a doctor. Then after he passed I was free in that confusion to decide for myself whether or not I wanted to do that, and my mom gave her blessing to my exploring my options. I actually rejected medicine for a few years, because I felt it was something my dad had been forcing me to do, but ultimately the issue with overthinking is that I wondered whether I was rejecting it because of my father. I realized that if I really wanted to be free of anyone’s influence there was no way to know other than by trying it for myself. I applied to as many schools as I could, and didn’t think I would get in anywhere since my academic record was below average. My hope was to just get all rejection letters and check the box that I was free of the decision, knowing that I wasn’t meant to become a doctor. However, I was fortunate enough to get in, with people kind enough to see me as a human being rather than someone who studies all the time. I was very grateful that the evolution of medicine had become more humanistic and organic. While in medical school I insisted on keeping my life outside of medicine, and ironically it was all the things that almost got me flunked out (extracurriculars, etc) that got me into residency and becoming director of resident wellness. And now in my last few months of residency, if nothing else happens I will become an attending.

I believe you took a gap year between Columbia and med school. Are you glad you did? What did you do during that time? [6:42]

The best advice I can give anyone is to not listen to anyone else’s advice but your own. The second piece of advice I can give is to recommend taking gap years, as it’s the best decision I ever made. I took the time off since I didn’t know the answer to what I wanted. To have the confidence to say, “I don’t know,” that is a valid answer. I tell people to embrace that.

This week we are airing an encore of one of our more popular podcasts this year, which is “Optimize Your Grad School Application.”

It’s an excellent time to air this podcast, because many of you are looking ahead to apply this summer or fall.  Reviewing the different moving parts of the grad school application, their purpose, and the tactics you can use to optimize each one will contribute to your success in the fall.

I also want to take the time to invite you to a couple webinars we will be hosting in the coming weeks.

1. The first is for med school applicants, on April 10th at 4pm PST/7pm EST – “Create a Winning AMCAS Application,” presented by Accepted’s consultant Alicia McNease Nimonkar. It’s free, but you do need to register.

2. For MBA applicants, you are invited to, “Get Accepted to Top MBA Programs with Low Stats,” which I will present twice, on April 18th at 10am PST/1pm CST and at 5pm PST/8pm EST. Register for the webinar here.

Click here for the full show notes.

I assume many of you are taking spring break right now, and hope you are having a wonderful time and thank you as always for listening!

Related Links:

• Fitting In & Standing Out: The Paradox at the Heart of Admissions, a free guide

• Round 3 vs Next Year: When should You Apply?, a recorded webinar

• 10 Tips for Writing Letters of Recommendation

• What if the President of the United States Wrote Your Letter of Recommendation?

• Create a Winning AMCAS Application , a recorded webinar

Related Shows:

• Your Past Doesn’t Define You

• 5 A’s for Your Low GPA

• Focus on Fit

• Stand Out! A Critical Goal for Your Application

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