See the Transformation

The spreadsheet said the factory should close. My analysis was airtight—$3.2M annual savings, 18-month payback. But when I presented to the client's CEO, she asked one question I couldn't answer: "Have you met the 847 people who work there?" I hadn't. So I did. What I learned changed how I think about consulting. The plant's efficiency problems weren't structural—they were informational. Floor managers had identified solutions years ago that never reached leadership. The real problem was a 12-layer hierarchy that filtered out bad news. I proposed a different recommendation: flatten the reporting structure and implement a direct feedback system. Six months later, the factory's output increased 23%. It's still open. That project taught me the limits of analytical frameworks when separated from human context. It's why I'm pursuing an MBA focused on operations and organizational behavior—not to manage spreadsheets better, but to understand what the spreadsheets miss. At HBS, I want to study with Professor Edmondson on psychological safety in organizations. Her research on "teaming" describes exactly what I saw fail at that factory—and what I want to build in my career as a COO transforming legacy manufacturing companies.

My grandmother's landlord raised her rent by 40% the month she was diagnosed with cancer. When I researched her options, I found that New York's rent stabilization laws had a loophole for "major capital improvements" that landlords exploited routinely. Her building's lobby renovation—marble floors she couldn't walk on—justified pricing her out. I spent that summer mapping MCI filings across 200 buildings in her neighborhood. The pattern was clear: improvements correlated with elderly tenant displacement, not building conditions. I submitted my findings to the city's housing court, where a judge cited them in a subsequent ruling limiting retroactive MCI increases. Law school isn't about "making a difference" in the abstract. It's about understanding how legal frameworks create the loopholes that harm people like my grandmother—and learning to close them.

The patient in Room 4 had been admitted three times in two months for diabetic ketoacidosis. I was just the scribe, documenting his history, but I noticed something: each admission came within a week of his insulin refill date. I mentioned this to his physician, who discovered that the patient's pharmacy was 11 miles away—impossible to reach without a car. His "non-compliance" was actually a transportation problem. We connected him with a pharmacy delivery service. He hasn't been readmitted in eight months. This experience crystallized why I want to practice medicine: the intersection of clinical reasoning and systems thinking. A diagnosis identifies what's wrong biologically. But treatment requires understanding the patient's entire context—their transportation, their work schedule, their insurance formulary. I've since led a quality improvement project analyzing readmission patterns among diabetic patients at our hospital. The data suggests that 34% of preventable readmissions involve medication access issues—a finding that's now informing our discharge planning protocols. I want to become a physician who treats diseases and the systems that prevent patients from managing them.