Business School Essay

It is -15°F in Grand Forks, North Dakota as I walk from my car to the front door of the Stadter Center Hospital where my company’s first sleep lab is located. The cold is bone-chilling and for a split second my warm office at Lincoln International, where I was an investment banker just five months ago eating sushi and working on financial models, comes to my mind. I smile to myself; the thought disappears as quickly as it enters.

I made the career switch and founded Somnium (which means ‘dream’ in Latin) because I know exactly what I want to do with my future: I want to build a healthcare company focused on providing sleep services to rural America. My father has been a sleep and lung physician for 30 years. I grew up in Iowa watching him care for patients and learned first-hand just how deeply interwoven the field of medicine is into the fabric of communities, especially rural ones. However, unlike my father who chose the field of medicine, my thinking was that if he could make such a difference, what could 100 or 1000 physicians just like him do? I wanted to use business to take making a difference to scale.

Just recently, the Stadter Center approached me to open two more sleep labs with them in rural North Dakota (Tioga and Minot). However, there is a big difference between a three lab operation and my vision for Somnium where we are operating hundreds of labs and truly bringing rural areas the healthcare services they deserve. The Columbia MBA, and the HPM program in particular, is the bridge from here to there, and I plan to return to Somnium immediately after earning a MBA.

My background is as a liberal arts major, what I need are the building blocks for business. I need to learn best practices in operations management. I need to learn about organizational behavior. I need to learn marketing techniques in healthcare and in other industries which I can apply to healthcare. When I look through the Core and HPM courses online,