Page 28 - SAM September 2019

FEATURE

The Making of My

MD, MBA

“Adult Ed is a Mother, but it’s also a Keeper!” … Dr. Lulu

By Uchenna Umeh, MD

After my term as a Lt. Col in the United States Air Force, I had ferent, yet similar. There were veterans, foreigners, parents, di-
the opportunity to join the Air Force Reserves, go back to school, vorcees, and one other one Black person, a Nigerian like me!
or work as a pediatrician. I chose school and work. I had no spe- Awon Naija sha!
cific “why”, since I earned the VA educational funds, it was more The school system was a challenge for me. Folks call their pro-
like “why not?” My friends and family had mixed reactions. Never fessors by their first names. Huh? Not in Nigeria, tufiakwa! I
one to dwell on a thought, I jumped in before I lost my nerve. graduated in the early ‘90s. We had real chalkboards, not smart-
Coincidentally, I was in great company since my son and spouse boards. Our blackboards were not virtual, they were black and
were both students as well. present in the classroom. I had no concept of office-hours or
I wondered how I would manage work, school and “mommy- what it meant to access library books online, and to “check them
ing.” I initially wanted the combined MBA/MPH program, but out” virtually. Really?
fear and doubt discouraged me, so the MBA it was. I put my best As the only physician and one of only two blacks of the co-
Naija Igbo Woman foot forward and started the regular MBA. The hort, I had no one else wearing my exact shoes. I had to weather
first semester was a breeze (or was it?). I was going back to school statistics alone. (I had biostatistics in med school, sensitivity and
in the tech age! What? Reminding me of when I first came to the specificity – not Anova or Covariance Analysis). Since I hate
USA, attending an American school was full of new experiences. numbers, accounting and finance and Excel were nightmares.
I was the oldest student in a class with millennials. What struck They made for many a tear-filled day at the professors’ offices.
me was their attitudes towards the work. They showed up late Every now and again, I felt lonely and left out, but my resilience
and didn’t often do their portion of the schoolwork. This both- and adaptability would kick in and I would win little battles.
ered me so much that, I considered disenrolling. Luckily my ad- Macro economics was good, but not Micro. The professor
viser suggested the Executive MBA program instead. Once I works for the FED, he is a kindly older gentleman with a thick
understood what an Executive MBA was, I was sold! However, Texan accent and a friendly smile. I spent many afternoons in his
some “friends” queried the “executiveness” of it… “Is it a wa- office at the Federal Building downtown San Antonio. Corporate
tered-down MBA? “Is it an online/electronic E-MBA?” “Are you restructuring was okay until we got into the calculations. As a
going to have a real MBA degree afterwards?” and, “Why are you wordsmith, organizational behavior was great, ethics was a bit
going back to school, aren’t you tired?” Hmm…how does one confusing. Marketing, negotiations, business strategy and inter-
respond to all that love? national business studies were easy. Executive coaching, an elec-
Either way, I got in, and I was already enrolled in the school tive, was with one cool Chica who once worked for NASA. She
of business, I only needed an intradepartmental transfer. is equal part brains, beauty, class and control.
My Executive MBA cohorts were people closer to my age – I LOVE reading and discussions, so my favorite subject was
adults. We had a lot in common. They were experienced and leadership. Our professor was cool and soft-spoken, the cases
wanted to do their schoolwork. My kind of people. We were dif- were interesting and thought-provoking. I enjoyed learning about

28 San Antonio Medicine • September 2019