Best of Both Worlds

Army-Baylor MBA/MHA program broadens skillsets, lays foundation for leadership

By Justin Walker

The U.S. Army and Baylor University have a long-standing partnership to further military personnel in their education. This includes collaborations with several colleges across Baylor’s campus, including the Hankamer School of Business.

The Army-Baylor University Graduate Program in Health and Business Administration dates back to 1947 as a short course on hospital administration, Teresa Hinnerichs, PhD, program director and assistant professor, said. The program evolved to issue a Master’s degree in 1953. Starting with the 2005-2007 class, Army-Baylor partnered with the School to offer an additional joint MBA/MHA degree. The added degree plan was a significant move due to the different skill set it provides, Hinnerichs said.

“The Masters of Healthcare Administration is an absolutely wonderful degree as it targets the health policy and health sector,” Hinnerichs, who graduated from the MBA/MHA program in 2010, said. “The Masters in Business Administration is an added dimension that gives our students more insight into the business environment with additional classes such as international business, business law topics, and organizational ethics.”

There is a beauty to how the program operates, Hinnerichs said. While offered through the military, it functions like any other graduate-level program offered at other institutions. The difference is the Army-Baylor Program can leverage data case examples and tools from the military health system that makes the program unique, she said.

“We expose our students to the federal health sector in a way that most graduate healthcare management programs don’t,” she said.

The program is not for the faint of heart, Hinnerichs said. The MHA/MBA degree plan consists of 78 credit hours completed through the program’s first year, she said. Students arrive at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in June to begin the first of five accelerated semesters before entering the residency portion of the program in July of the following year.

Residency sites are a mix of military and civilian hospital systems, Hinnerichs said. For the 16 students who entered their second year in the summer of 2021, some residencies were established with Kaiser Permanente and the Mayo Clinic, as well as with HCA hospitals and several military hospital sites.

The Army-Baylor MHA and MBA/MHA degrees are unique in their size as well, Hinnerichs said. Army-Baylor regularly has 55 MHA and 30 MBA/MHA students. For the MBA/MHA, this year 25 students applied for graduation in August, 16 students will enter residency in July and 21 students will join the program in June.

One question that gets raised very frequently within the military is why a graduate-level education is offered, Hinnerichs said. The answer is pretty clear to her.

“We want leaders that commit to lifelong learning,” she said. “As military officers, we are very passionate about refining our craft. Graduate-level education broadens the military officer’s skillsets and also develops and refines critical thinking skills. I think those two components are the foundation for leadership.”

All About the Pluses

Melissa Thomas always searches for the silver linings, even in the darkest days

By Justin Walker

For Melissa Thomas, it has always been about helping others. From a young age, Thomas had an interest in medicine and solving problems. It was a combination of serving others and an interest in being a self-described “mad scientist” that propelled Thomas toward her career.

Growing up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Thomas was a typical high school student. She enjoyed sports and was pretty good when it came to academics. One of her teachers noticed a particular trait about her and suggested looking into a military academy for college.

Thomas took the suggestion and visited the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. If she was going to attend one of the academies, she knew from the start that it would be West Point or nothing. There, she watched as cadets played a game of ultimate Frisbee when the cannon went off for Reveille.

Melissa Thomas, MBA/MHA ’12
Emergency Medicine Physician Resident; Yale New Haven Hosp.
New Haven, Connecticut

“They immediately stopped mid-throw in the middle of the game and all turned to salute the flag,” she said. “That floored me. I am such a competitive person and into sports that the fact they would all stop in the middle of playing and all recognize something bigger than themselves—it connected with me.”

Thomas chose West Point over other competitive programs at Duke and Harvard because there was something special—there was a good education plus an opportunity to challenge herself physically. The experience would prepare her well as she intended to go straight to medical school upon graduation.

During her sophomore year, 9/11 occurred. She witnessed others deploying overseas and she knew she wanted to be a part of that experience. She deferred her medical school acceptance and joined the Medical Service Corps (MSC) in 2004. A year later, her unit deployed to Iraq.

Thomas continued to rise in the ranks and on her second deployment, she served as a company commander over roughly 100 people in three different locations across Iraq. Rising in the ranks of the MSC allows for specialization, she said. Thomas wanted a bit of everything, though, so she specialized in general hospital administration. This led her to Baylor, where she enrolled in the Army-Baylor Program in San Antonio to obtain a dual MBA/MHA degree.

“It is a top-notch program,” Thomas said. “If you were to go to a different civilian school, you wouldn’t necessarily get to learn some of those intricacies on top of the typical economics and financial courses. Plus, the connections you make from having your cohort of other people who are in the federal healthcare system—those are your friends for life.”

The second year of the program sent Thomas to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to complete her administrative residency. She was learning everything about healthcare administration and she noticed how she could help people from this career. But deep down, there was still a spark to return to her medical school plans. She began studying and applying for med schools when tragedy hit.

Thomas’ husband, whom she married in 2004, died unexpectedly on New Year’s Eve 2014. It could have derailed her plans, but instead, she found inspiration in the darkness. She was accepted into Yale School of Medicine, where she graduated in May 2020. Now in her second year of residency, she emphasizes learning from her experiences and sharing her and her husband’s story to help others.

“I feel like I’ve had this interest in how society deals with death and those end-of-life conversations just having had to deal with the grieving process,” she said. “It is something I’ve reflected on a lot throughout medical school.”

Those types of conversations are rare in our society, Thomas said, but they will eventually be dealt with. It is better to think about it now so people are prepared before they end up talking to family members in the emergency room in moments of crisis, she said.

“I feel like that’s an interest of mine—continuing to try and change our culture about death,” Thomas said. “That is something I’ve tried to figure out how I can continue to have that conversation and make that impact.”

Ready for Action

Armed with unique skills developed in the service, members of the military are bringing a wealth of know-how to the business world

By Kevin Tankersley

For many veterans making the shift from the military to a civilian workplace, it is not the actual hard skills they learned while serving that makes them good employees. Instead, it is all those other things they picked up along the way that help make the transition a smooth one.

After all, there are not many civilian jobs that require employees to fly a fighter jet or engage in artillery combat, but the challenge that veterans often face is how to explain to a hiring manager that those skills can translate to a non-military job setting.

Helping the nearly 100 veterans who are students at Baylor make that change is the primary role of Kevin Davis, a program manager of Veteran Educational and Transition Services (VETS).

He said that his job is “taking the big Baylor mission—to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service and building strategic resources and community—to effectively transition our military-connected students to this calling outside of the military, recognizing and validating that these unique students have already lived this calling during their military service.”

“You have got these 18- to 22-year-olds who were in charge of equipment worth millions of dollars and sometimes even human lives,” Davis, who has overseen VETS since 2016, said. “How do we take all that awesome experience and translate that in a way that an employer is going to understand it?”

A soldier who was in the infantry, for example, might not think that particular job skill translates into any other field. Davis, however, disagrees.

“You were planning out routes and navigation patrols,” he said. “You were thinking logistics, you were thinking management, how you’re leading your team through this. There are a lot of skills—on a profound level—that you deployed in order to do that effectively. Let’s find that common language that is going to resonate with that employer.”

Davis joined the Marines after graduating from Lewis-Palmer High School in Monument, Colorado. He served four years and then earned a psychology degree from Baylor in 2012. He said that veterans leaving the service often face three significant losses—the loss of community, the loss of structure and the loss of identity and purpose—and his office works with student veterans to address all of those.

With the military being such a mission-focused organization, veterans transitioning into companies or non-profits where the mission isn’t as clear or emphasized often face challenges, said Forest Kim.

“Every organization, of course, has a mission and I have had peers that went out, took a job, but did not feel that sense of esprit de corps—did not feel that strong sense of mission,” he said. “In some (organizational) cultures, for some people, it was just a job. It was not strongly tied to a sense of intrinsic motivation.”

Kim is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Hankamer School of Business and serves as the program director for the Robbins MBA Healthcare. He spent about half of his military career as an administrator at large Army hospitals. Kim earned a PhD from the University of Washington along the way and was director of the Army-Baylor Health and Business Administration Program before retiring as a lieutenant colonel from a 22-year Army career. In 2013, he deployed to Afghanistan for six months and served as a military medical training advisor and did some gratifying work, he said.

Decoding the civilian hierarchy

Kim said that some of his peers who landed in organizations that lacked a strong purpose often later went to work as a civil servant or contractor, doing similar work, “just not wearing the uniform.”

And, he said, the lack of uniforms in civilian life is another change that veterans must face.

“Everybody knows their place in the pecking order (in the military). You wear it literally on your shirt sleeves on your shoulder,” Kim said. “You can walk into any setting and even if you do not know anyone—it is the first time meeting everyone—you know your place. ‘That person outranks me. I outrank that person.’ In a civilian setting, it does take time to understand where the pecking order is and where you fall within that pecking order. In some sense, you kind of start from ground zero in terms of establishing credibility. That is a challenge many transitioning veterans face, including me.”

There are ways to deal with that challenge, Patty Horoho, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general said.

“If you are entering a room, you should have done your homework and you should understand who you are meeting,” she said. “Look at the bios. Understand what the person does, so you know who that person is. And you can go to and introduce yourself. Also remember, if you are in a room, you should make eye contact with everybody that is in that room, and you should make everybody that is in the room feel important and valued. And if most of the people in the room are senior to you, you still should convey that same exchange of confidence and respect.

“I have always believed that if you treat everybody with dignity and respect, it does not matter what your rank is or what position someone is in.”

Horoho, who had a 34-year career in the Army, was the first nurse corps officer and the first woman to become surgeon general of the Army. She worked at the Pentagon on 9/11 and provided first aid care to 75 others injured during the attack. She is now CEO of OptumServe, which serves the federal health services business of Optum and UnitedHealth Group.

“Relationships are key to everything,” she said. “There is automatic credibility given with your rank because people know what it takes to earn that particular rank. In the corporate world, there is not instant credibility because you walk in civilian clothes, and nobody knows whether you are the CEO or whether you are a brand-new employee in the organization unless you start building relationships. And once you build relationships, when you are working on a project, people want to be part of that, they want to help once you foster that type of environment.”

Dean’s Message

It is a pleasure for me to be writing the dean’s message in this magazine for the first time. I am blessed to begin my role as dean of the Hankamer School of Business. I am excited to start my journey here in Waco and play a part in continuing Baylor’s Christian mission.

We are returning to the near state of normalcy we have all craved for the better part of a year and a half. Students, faculty and staff are once again roaming Foster Campus, collaborating through face-to-face interactions and enjoying each other’s company.

There is a long history of success here at the School, in large part to my predecessor, Terry Maness. I want to once again thank him for his years of service and wish him a happy retirement.

As we thank Terry for his service, I also want to extend my appreciation to our U.S. active service members and veterans who have sacrificed so much for our freedoms. In this issue of the Baylor Business Review, we highlight a few of the amazing men and women who have served in the U.S. military in various ways, from the medical tent to the cockpit of a B-47 and everywhere in between. We cannot begin to express our gratitude for everything they have done and continue to do for our nation and their communities.

Sandeep Mazumder
William E. Crenshaw Endowed Dean, Hankamer School of Business