Crystal Nguyen ’23

As an undergrad at Drexel, Crystal Nguyen studied up on the music business. But in the long run, it was the business that she connected with more than the music.

After graduation, she went to work in what is now called the Family and Visitor Services Department at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her business training helped her land a supervisor role, and so she returned Drexel for a LeBow MBA with an eye toward growing her career in healthcare administration.

“I had a taste of what business education could do, through the concentration piece of my undergrad work. Through that I was able to get pretty far in my professional career, but I felt like there was more that I needed to learn,” she said.

By pursuing the MBA while also working in the hospital, she was able to get the most out of both experiences. “I would learn something in class, and then apply it right away the next morning,” she said. “Then I could use what I had done at work as a discussion point in class.”

Having previously been a patient at Stanford Pediatrics, she understood the importance of a children’s hospital, and she was eager to help grow a newly-formed department — one that was focused specifically on supporting the families of child-patients.

As program manager, Crystal oversees the team that runs a resource center providing care and support to families, as well as the site access team and the telehealth team. She graduated the MBA program with a 3.9 GPA, and that experience has helped her rise to the challenges of managing multiple teams.

For example, a required class in organizational behavior explored the ways in which values drive leadership. That learning has proved pivotal in supporting her professional efforts. “Because I work in a new department and in a role that doesn’t exist in every hospital system, a lot of the work I do is unknown,” she said. “But my personal set of values, along with the hospital’s institutional values, help me to face challenges without having a how-to book.”

Her LeBow coursework, including a certificate in change leadership and strategy and hands-on experience in devising and presenting solutions for a real firm, continues to pay off day-to-day.

“I work with a lot of senior-level executives, and I have to make the message speak to different types of people,” she says. “Sometimes we only have 30 seconds to get our point across, and experiential learning was a very good model in practicing that.”

All that training comes together to help her solve practical problems, like when the new patient tower at CHOP disrupted the usual parking patterns.

“That changes how the families enter the building, and one would think it’s simple. But it requires the coordination of multiple departments,” she said. Thanks to her training at LeBow, Crystal can ensure her teams work together to get those families where they are going.

As a manager, she always has one eye on the hospital’s long-term plans, and “it’s really exciting to be a leader in those efforts,” she said.