During the summer between First and Second Years at UVA Darden, Full-Time MBA students have the opportunity to complete an internship in their prospective field, often leading to exciting full-time opportunities post-graduation. Kristin Scruggs (Class of 2025) exemplifies this pathway perfectly. Her summer internship with Chartis, a leading healthcare consulting firm, concluded with a well-earned full-time offer!
Read on to hear more about Kristin’s inspiring journey.
Hometown: Salt Lake City, UT
Career pre-Darden: Speech-Language Pathologist
Second-Year Leadership Roles: Darden Tutoring Co-Chair, Graduate Women in Business (GWIB) VP Academics, Forté Ambassador
Summer Internship at Chartis
This past summer I had the opportunity to intern at Chartis, a healthcare consulting firm that focuses on strategy consulting in the provider sector. I had an overwhelmingly positive experience at Chartis and am excited to return as a full-time consultant after graduation.
Before I came to Darden I worked as a Medical Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) providing diagnostic services and rehabilitative therapy for patients during their stay in the acute care hospital. Working in hospitals gave me exposure to the inefficiencies of healthcare, and I realized that if I wanted to be in a role where I would have the opportunity to improve things, I needed to learn more about the business drivers in healthcare and transition into a role where I could affect change from the top down.
Yes to Consulting
I decided early on that consulting was the right path for me because I wanted to gain exposure to a wide variety of healthcare businesses and develop a broad set of analytical and leadership skills. During recruiting, I networked with several healthcare firms, however Chartis really stood out from the rest. I believe that any company working in healthcare must seriously consider how their business promotes and affects issues such as health equity, access to care, practitioner burnout, and treating rural populations. Chartis is a mission-driven firm that has arms dedicated to each these issues and believes that “materially improving healthcare fundamentally improves the world.”1 Because of their strong commitment to their mission, I knew I wanted to be a part of this firm. In January 2024, was lucky enough to obtain an offer from Chartis out of their New York office.
Project Details
I was staffed on a Hospital-at-Home (H@H) implementation for a large health system in Florida. Chartis is a remote company, (though they have offices in Chicago, New York, Boston, and San Francisco) so my team was spread across the U.S. With a large team (8 core members) I had plenty of help and guidance throughout the internship. Additionally, the other consultant on the team was my project liaison and helped me ramp up to the consulting life and was there for any question, no matter how small. We became great friends, and I can’t express how grateful I am for all her guidance and support.
When I started the project, I shared my internship goals with my engagement manager and partner, highlighting that I wanted analytical experience because I didn’t have the opportunity to build this skill in my previous career. They met this request, and my first task was to conduct an analysis on the effect/benefit of including Medicaid insured patients in H@H once the program launched. My findings from the analysis were presented to the executive sponsor team, and the client applied for a Medicaid waiver so they could include these patients in the program.
Since H@H is a fairly new concept to U.S. healthcare, Chartis needed to develop internal tools that they would use on future H@H implementations. Consequently, much of my work over the summer consisted of working on this initiative. I was tasked with creating a compendium, which would outline the work that needed to be completed throughout the implementation for the six different project workstreams. Additionally, I was tasked with creating a workforce staffing model to be used on future H@H projects. While this was a challenging project the help I received, not just from my team, but from people across the firm, was never ending. I thoroughly enjoyed tackling this problem and am proud of the results.
The Wrap-Up
Near the end of my internship, I had the opportunity to attend a Caucus Connect retreat. “Caucus” includes anyone working as an analyst, associate consultant, or consultant and it’s a very close-knit group. This retreat is time for caucus members to connect and always includes fun events at beautiful locations. By the time my internship came to an end I didn’t want to leave. I grew to love my team, I found the work exciting and challenging, and I wanted to keep learning more. I can’t wait to return to Chartis where I know I will be challenged in all the right ways, but most importantly where I will be working on my goal to transform healthcare and improve the lives of others.
Source of Quote:
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https://www.chartis.com/about/our-culture
