Jade Trinh ’25

For more than a decade, Jade Trinh worked her way up the ladder at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), rising from lab scientist to procurement specialist.

“BMS is a great place to grow, and I was always given new opportunities,” she says.

To go further, though, she knew she needed an educational boost.

“I wasn’t as comfortable with the financial aspect, when we’re looking at budgeting or at P&Ls,” she says.

“I wanted to look at the company from an enterprise lens. I knew the areas that I was in, but I had never thought real estate, for example. I was procuring manufacturing services, so why would I have ever thought about real estate?”

A colleague who’d been to Drexel told her about the Executive MBA program, and “I felt like that could accelerate my journey,” she says.

The program did just that: During her studies, she won promotion from a role in procurement to a job in supply chain, a move she’d been hoping to make. “Supply chain is a skill that you can transfer company to company, industry to industry,” she says. She hadn’t even taken a supply chain class yet when she got the promotion, “but I was able to leverage some of the things I already learned.”

As she finished her degree, she says, “it was the perfect opportunity for me to think: What’s my next step? How can I take everything I’ve learned and put that to use?”

After graduation she took that next step, into her current role as director of the strategic management office.

“While I was in supply chain, I had gotten to run programs that funneled into the enterprise strategy. I took what I learned in the EMBA program and I put all that into my interview,” she says.

“They were asking questions about how I would handle different scenarios, and I could answer based on what I had learned from the MBA program. The stars aligned, the timing was perfect. I had all these new skills that I was implementing, and it was exactly what they were looking for,” she says.

In her current leadership role, Trinh orchestrates company activities at the enterprise level. “When the company wants to move forward, the first part of that is the strategy,” she says. “Let’s say for example we want to create a new site somewhere. I’ll think about things like: Who does this impact? Who needs to have input? What are the financials involved?”

In a case like that, she might explore relevant government policies or factor real estate, taxes, corporate security or human resources into her decisions. “I’m putting a together that whole picture of what the impacts are, what the risks are, and this means to the company,” she says.

Trinh’s Drexel experience helped prepare her for the role. She points in particular to a course on Value Creation Across the Enterprise. “In our opening class, we did a simulation on how to run a company, and we probably all bombed it,” she laughs. By the end of the course, she had her feet solidly on the ground.

The international trip to Denmark and Sweden broadened her horizons, and a course on negotiations was pivotal as well. “We learned that it’s not about winning a negotiation,” she says. “It’s about being a person that somebody would want to work with again.”

A change management course was the icing on the cake. Driving change in what she does now, “and I think every day about the exercises that we did in that class,” she says.