Ever wonder how a young professional can go from a MHA graduate of the University of Utah, a CAHME Accredited program, to a health tech industry expert and master networker?
In this episode of Master Your Healthcare Career we welcome Alex Maiersberger. Alex is a Global Principal for Health Care at SAS, the category leader in AI and Analytics.
Prior to joining SAS, Alex served in corporate strategy at sector leaders Blue Cross in North Carolina, and Geisinger Health Plan. But underlying a career growth path is something different…what he did for others.
Alex co-founded the Advancement League, and the formation of their annual event, the Young Health Leader Summit. This membership organization focuses on helping health care leaders find and align their personal mission with leading organizations through carefully curated events and retreats that start with community impact.
Alex’s underlying message of being confident in yourself and your career path is essential to all.
Tune in to listen to this episode now!
Ever wonder how a young professional can go from a MHA graduate of the University of Utah, a CAHME Accredited program, to a health tech industry expert and master networker?
In this episode of Master Your Healthcare Career we welcome Alex Maiersberger. Alex is a Global Principal for Health Care at SAS, the category leader in AI and Analytics.
Prior to joining SAS, Alex served in corporate strategy at sector leaders Blue Cross in North Carolina, and Geisinger Health Plan. But underlying a career growth path is something different…what he did for others.
Alex co-founded the Advancement League, and the formation of their annual event, the Young Health Leader Summit. This membership organization focuses on helping health care leaders find and align their personal mission with leading organizations through carefully curated events and retreats that start with community impact.
Alex’s underlying message of being confident in yourself and your career path is essential to all.
Tune in to listen to this episode now!
Thank you, Melissa, for that introduction and a warm welcome today to Alex Mayersberger, who is joining us on a special call today, and I've had some discussions with Alex around his work with the Advancement League. I'm really excited to talk to him. He is a young professional who's making a difference. And, Alex, just to kind of begin, could you give us a little bit of your backstory about you know? You graduated from a Cami Accredited Program, University of Utah, and right now you're a global expert at SAS. So can you kind of fill the group in with that a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's such an honor to be here as well. I think we'll probably get into it a little bit, but this is a full circle moment in my life, as you mentioned a graduate from a Cami Accredited Program and at one point, choosing graduate school obviously is a big life decision. There's student loans. I had a young child during graduate school, and so it was family dynamics, all the things and the program that I went to actually, when I first registered for school, was not Cami Accredited, and so it was that leap of faith. But the leap of faith that I was taking was because the program director had promised at what point she said we will be Cami Accredited by the end of your tenure here, and so it was a bet I was making, and a large part of that bet was on that Cami Accreditation, and so I remember just the sleepless nights and the worries of making sure that the word Cami means a lot to me personally, and so this is super exciting. So, like you said, I lead global product marketing for healthcare at SAS data and analytics and AI company, which is really exciting.
Speaker 2:It's been a fun career journey. I've gone from small health tech startup to hospital administrator, to insurance leader, to global technology leader and so kind of traversed the healthcare ecosystem bingo card. And along the way, a few friends and I created the Young Health Leader Summit leading event for early career professionals. And now, as our hair gets a little grayer on the sides, we have a good mentor of ours and one of our early career CEOs, dr David Feinberg, who's now chairman of Oracle. He jokes that as we've kept the event going, that it needs to be called the Middle Age Summit, at least now. So we've had a lot of fun along the way.
Speaker 1:Alex, there's an interesting point in your career journey where all of a sudden you go from the young person who's the exciting young professional to the mid-careerist that everyone goes to advice, to the older statesmen or the elder statesmen, and you don't notice those trends kind of going in your career but they do happen and they're kind of startling in your professional career. I love SAS, I have to say. I know it's known as the SAS Institute now and kudos for working there. I used SAS back in my undergraduate day with punch cards so I mean that's how old I am and again that journey through there. But SAS is really one of the leading statistical packages that was out there and they've certainly brought in their perspective and really kind of neat that you're the global lead there, so that's kind of cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an incredible place and I think people recognize SAS from a lot of the Forbes articles or the cultural aspect of it. They're very unique. It's been a private company for 50 years and so it's been a unique way to reinvest in employees. They've created this amazing campus environment where we have a health care center that has a lot of unique aspects for the way they take care of their employees physical, mental, emotional health, as well as soccer fields and pools and all the fun stuff as well. So you'll have a call with a colleague at 10 am sometimes they just came from a work intramural soccer game and you're like, wait a minute, why am I not out playing soccer?
Speaker 2:But the other exciting thing, like you said, is they've been able to reinvest so much back into the platform and the programming and so it started as that statistical language and has now really evolved into an end-to-end platform and so really interesting things.
Speaker 2:I call it sort of foundational and future of some of the foundational back end infrastructure type things, cohort building within to target diabetic populations or for payers, or different things, as well as future predictive models and governing the newest AI, and so really, really fun, lots of great customers and, to your point lots of great customers that we've had for 50 years or 40 or 50 years around the world, and so you really get to hear some insight into the stories of how is this hospital dealing with the optimization of their staffing workforce in Spain. And then you get to go to a payer in Indianapolis or wherever it is in the United States and you get to hear how have they been dealing with these challenges and what are they doing, what have they been investing in over the last 20 years from a technology standpoint? And so it's been an incredible learning place and an incredible leading place.
Speaker 1:Now one of the fascinating things to me about SAS is their investment in you and your mission around the advancement league. I mean, you see, sas is involved with that. And again, what makes a company a great company A great company is when they invest in thought leadership and they're not just worried about selling you a statistical package, they're worrying about how do we move the field forward. And when I look at what SAS did with you in the advancement league, to me that kind of represents a great company kind of moving forward. And so a little bit about the advancement league. I think you and I have talked about it before in the past. What really is interesting to me around that is how you and a gentleman named Antoine Williams got together and said, hey, we have an idea and we're going to move forward with it. So if you could kind of tell our listeners about that idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, early career is very difficult and I think it's very difficult to articulate sort of what you're going through, especially in what we did was an administrative fellowship program together, and so you are reporting to the CEO of a hospital. Very early in your career. You have this very in-depth look at executive leadership and you're tasked with some really important responsibilities. The challenge is you're being trained to be a hospital CEO and if you feel somewhere within your skill set or your heart that you don't want to be a hospital CEO, it's really hard. Who do you tell that to? You can't go to your boss and be like hey, you've invested a bunch of money and time and effort into me and now I'm realizing I don't want to do this.
Speaker 2:And it's really hard to go to some even program members that are sort of at the same time as you, because in some ways you're competing with them for a future role, and so it becomes really difficult to articulate hey, I'm struggling here, I don't know that this is a fit for me, what else is out there? And you're also just so busy with work and maybe some of your personal life, your starting young family, whatever it is that it just gets really difficult to surround yourself with new people, and so if you're surrounded by all hospital people and you say, hey, I don't know if I want to work in a hospital anymore, how do you go out and find the time and find the people to get some resources around? What else is out there in the world? And so we were really fortunate to create a close friendship Myself, antoine Williams, sam Belukoff, who's now out at Kaiser. Of all the hard jobs in the world, he leads Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu, hawaii.
Speaker 1:Oh I feel bad for him, right.
Speaker 2:Yes, we came from some tough days in Northeast Pennsylvania and guys and her together, and we've all headed to warmer locations. I'm now in North Carolina. Antoine is down at Orlando Health after some stints in Detroit, michigan as well at Henry Ford. But really it started as we had some of these conversations at lunch or things where we'd say hey, and it was usually me, I was probably the odd man out of like, hey, I don't know if I signed up for all of this and what else is out there. And so they'd say, hey, I have a friend that went to grad school that didn't choose the hospital path. Maybe you could reach out to him or maybe you could talk to her. And so we started saying, hey, if we're having these conversations, maybe it's, maybe there's other people like us that are having these conversations and there's no real place that we can go to have them.
Speaker 2:So we actually just posted a I think the original one was on Instagram and it was called a health care road trip and we said we've got a couple friends visiting from a hospital out in Cleveland. They're going to be in town spending the night at our house for the weekend. If anybody wants to come meet up with us on a Saturday morning. We've got a few people ready to talk health care, and the first health care road trip that we hosted there were people that we did not know.
Speaker 2:It just speaks to the power of the internet too. People that we did not know rented cars in New York City and drove three and a half hours out to Danville, pennsylvania which if you've ever been there, it's a little tough to navigate to and get to and showed up that morning to say, hey, we want to talk health care. We saw this on the internet, and so that snowballed into an event called the Young Health Leader Summit. We said can we do this in a more coordinated way? Can we do it more meaningfully? And we're now in year six of that. And then the Advancement League is the wraparound package of what we do outside of the event.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating. I have been to Danville and, yes, it is kind of in the middle of northeastern Pennsylvania, a little bit of a ride from New York City, a little bit of a ride from Philadelphia, but an incredible great system out at Geisinger to kind of spend some time with. There was a quote from Phil Hudson, who's the CEO of Rock Digital, and it was interesting CEO of Rock Digital and screenwriter is what he listed as his title and he said Alex has a unique ability to bring out the best in every, unique ability to bring out the best in everyone. Alex, I don't know if you've ever heard me kind of talk to students.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the things I always say to them is don't network. And they kind of look at me like I've got a third eye Help people. And I think what to me is impressive about your journey is you are really helping people, you are bringing out the best in other people, you're creating avenues for discussion that help other people kind of move forward and while doing that, significantly helps yourself. But I don't think you look at it as an approach of how do I, alex, get better at the expense of others, or who are the people that I need to network higher, higher up in the chain, but how do I kind of move everyone forward with me and by doing that, creating an amazing network of people? Your thoughts?
Speaker 2:First, thanks for bringing up the Phil Hudson quote. What a great memory from the past. Those are an incredible person and screenwriter. I believe he's got a new Netflix special but he's the producer for of. I think it's called Tacoma something Tacoma FD it's a firefighting comedy show, so please go check that out. So the quote about trying to help other people are bringing out the best in other people.
Speaker 2:I joke that I was blessed with the anti-Michael Jordan gene, where Michael Jordan once is known for that hyper competitiveness. I actually just I love to see other people win and it's somewhere in my human nature that I think there's room for all of us and so if you win it doesn't feel like oh shoot, I lost, or I guess it's hey, someone else won and my time's coming. And I think some of that spawns from just a fortunate position to sort of be able to experience a lot of different things in life. And one of the really unfortunate things I think that I've seen at all different stages of life unfortunately, is friends pass away young because of drug addiction or car crashes or just the difficulties of life, and I've seen friends near me go from sort of we'll call it like low level management to CEO in a very short span as well. And so you see those two flip sides, or I've seen people kind of seemingly have it all and lose it all very quickly.
Speaker 2:And so I think those experiences in life, the more you have them and maybe the earlier you had them, makes it so that you realize that everyone around you offers something and you can offer everyone around you something. And so you truly sort of just don't know what tomorrow brings. And so the best thing I see so many people from a networking perspective, exactly like you said, you sort of network up naturally. And so you go to an event and you're like hey, and we've all had that experience as well.
Speaker 2:If you have that name badge hanging from your chest at an event, I've had people come up and they look at you on the elevator and your title isn't important enough, and you sort of get that they read the title real quick and just immediately turned back around instead of hey, this is another human in front of me. What's going on in your life, what's interesting, what do you like to do, all the things? And so that person today may have a title that doesn't mean anything to you, but tomorrow may be the person that's leading your division or at your company doing something, and so I've been really fortunate to see some of those things in life and it's really given me a good perspective of the person next to you can really be in your need today, or you can be in their need tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Alex, you know what, and I remember being there. I remember being at a conference and I was having a conversation with someone and all of a sudden he caught the badge of someone who was higher up than the manager of Graduate Health Systems Information Center and he went by and then off he went and I just I remember kind of thinking, yeah, that's an interesting way to network, you know, and don't remember whatever happened to that person. I wonder where they went in there. But I think it's a great lesson for everyone to kind of talk about is have a genuine interest in people and don't necessarily worry about what's in it. For me, and I think that's kind of the approach that you've taken, you know, as we kind of talked about the Advancement League and what you're doing with the Young Health Leaders Summit, so talk a little bit about the Young Health Leaders Summit, where you know you talked about its origins and where it's beginning, and I've looked at some of the YouTube videos on it and some of the Instagram postings on it and you've got something going there.
Speaker 2:So appreciate that we're so blessed and fortunate to attract so many incredible leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem now, and so it probably started out quite a bit with our kind of hospital and network and people that were genuinely interested in, hey, I want to be around other young people or I want to be around other people at this stage of a career. And then, as we've progressed in our careers and sort of traversed some of the healthcare ecosystem, started to attract some executives and some people who want to give back, and so now it's really this we call it this magical mix of the kindest collection of healthcare talent. I think some people come to the Young Health Leaders Summit. There's sort of a natural inclination so, naming it Young Health Leaders Summit, you definitely get some early MHA type students, mbas, mphs, a few undergrads, and so you attract some students. You attract some people very early in their careers, maybe first five years, whether it's hospital or health tech or other ones. And then what we've found these last few years especially is it's such a different world for young people right now because of economic inflation, maybe economic uncertainty, just the differing experiences that we've gone through these last few years that there's companies that want to attract these people to their companies. Or there's executives who want to give back to mentor, who want to be inspired to say, hey, what are the new technologies that early careerists are looking at? What should we be thinking about as an organization that we're thinking about differently. And so this year we're so excited. We're in year six. We've learned a lot, tested a lot along the years.
Speaker 2:Actually, you mentioned name badges. That we've all had that experience at an event. We do no name badges. Actually, the first year we did no name badges. Second year we did no name badges. There's something magical about just being in a room with incredible people and saying you have to sort of force yourself to say this is my name, what's yours? But as we've grown throughout the years now a couple hundred people strong, at these events, we do a blank name badge on day one and so you write whatever you want to write and it's been very powerful of a lot of people will write their first name, maybe organization. Some people will write I'm looking for a job, or I'm looking for someone to be a guest on my podcast, whatever it is. And so we've seen just incredible relationships. So incredible casual, try to keep it. And so before it's a casual address code, there's something unique about being in shorts and hanging out with an executive that just you can't get anywhere else.
Speaker 2:And this year is there's going to be some magic, both in the people. There's definitely compounding interest in the finance world and so if you invest, there's compounding over time. There's absolutely compounding interest in harassing people by email. So if you invite them in year one, they don't respond. Invite them year two, they don't respond. Invite them year three, they don't respond.
Speaker 2:Invite them year four, they say, hey, I'm busy those days. Year five, they say hey, I'm busy the years, those days. And year six, we've had the speakers that we tried to reach out to in year one reach out to us and say, hey, how can we be part of the Young Health Leader Summit? We'd love to come, we'd love to be a part of it, and so compounding interest in reaching out to people or doing anything for six years straight, a magical mix of people and a magical place in Windwood in Miami. And so, for all the thought and energy and effort we've put into the people and the content, the agenda, the thoughtfulness of the design of experiences that you'll have, everyone hears all that and kind of then hears Miami and they're like, oh yeah, we'll be there, we'll be there.
Speaker 2:We're slightly offended. We have to lead with it. It's in Miami in May, and so be a good time.
Speaker 1:There was an interesting part. I read about what you do, too, with the Advancement League and tell me if I got this wrong, but I read this and I was like, wow, what an incredibly great idea. You encourage sponsors to the organization, but what you do is you take the sponsorship money and you divide it up among the attendees who have to use it for some community impact. Comment that I read was you're serious about helping members put health everywhere and the comment is people get so involved in that process of taking that money and making an impact that you see people in tears and your goal is not to get people crying, but you've got people really kind of invested in making an improvement in the community. Talk about how that came to be.
Speaker 2:It came the very first conference that we ever went to, on the sort of company's dime we'll call it. We got sent to a conference and we sort of were very early in a career, and so early in a career you're also very hyper aware of your own financial standing and the investment of time and opportunity. And so we went to this event and we definitely wore our nicest clothes and we sat around and ate at restaurants that we probably had never eaten at before and saw the bills and all the things. And when we came back and had to sort of report out on what we did, it was the realization sort of struck us of a lot of the health care events that we go to. We sort of were seeing that money. It was like we spent a bunch of our organization's money. We went and we talked about all the health care problems, we ate some fancy dinners and then we're right back in the place that we were to start with. And so we had a little bit of that realization that, hey, if we ever have the chance to do a meaningful, large scale event, we would do some good while we were there. And the other thought was, could you do some good in a lot of different cities, and so if we held an event, could we do it in 10 different cities or 100 different cities throughout the years, meaning that if you came to our event every year, you now had a chance to experience and give back to those cities in a meaningful way, and so you'd have this just different perspective across your career of hey.
Speaker 2:I've been to Memphis, tennessee, and I spent some time there over a couple of days getting to know people in the community and working with them and seeing some of the struggles and challenges they had, and so it's been an incredible run. We've done it for five years where we take physical cash from sponsors, give it to attendees, put them in a group of strangers, essentially, and give them 24 hours and say your only objective is to go out into the community and spend it in a way that makes a difference. It's been absolutely incredible. We've seen communities change, we've seen careers change, but the story I always tells that there's a person that went was a hospital administrator, got this envelope of cash which only one group has ever lost the envelope of cash they just default brain, put it in a backpack and were like shoot, I don't know where it is. So we had people crawling under chairs trying to find it, but we found it.
Speaker 2:But she was in this group and basically, with a group of strangers of just a little bit of cash, was able to say, like I'm willing to fight these other strangers to make sure that we spend this money on pediatric mental health. I think the most good that we can do is helping the mental health of young people. It's going to change the future. It changes communities, all the things.
Speaker 2:And then the realization struck of like now that I'm forced to go put my money wherever my mouth is in a way that makes a difference for a healthier future.
Speaker 2:I don't actually do any of that in my day job.
Speaker 2:I have no relation to pediatric mental health and so shortly after the event went back, started to research which companies are tackling this joint, a startup in the pediatric mental health space, and so the outcome of life maybe changes in the outcome of careers and the good that she'll be able to do in the world changed because of just a forced exercise to say, if you really have to spend money in a way that you think makes a difference, where do you spend it?
Speaker 2:This year is going to be our first year to change up actually the impact competition. We've learned so much from it and done so much good from it. We're really going to start partnering with some local organizations that have long term commitment to their the home communities where we serve, and so this will be the first year of, instead of that, 24 hour community impact competition. It's going to be a hopefully long term community impact on, and so we have a pitch competition, still giving sponsorship money, but working with some local organizations to bring all that external expertise into the local community and then pass it along to people who are there and who can continue it over time. So we're excited to see how we can evolve and see where it takes it.
Speaker 1:Alex, what an incredibly insightful approach to take and what a really great way to make an impact in the community. By making that impact in the community, you're also influencing people's careers development too in that process. So it's a win-win all around and congratulations on doing that. Again. I'll be reading a little bit more about you in preparation for this, and we do our homework when we talk to our guests.
Speaker 1:One of the things that you wrote was the importance of learning to do one thing at a time and becoming an expert in that one thing at a time, and I had a conversation.
Speaker 1:Why that really kind of stuck to me is.
Speaker 1:I had a conversation with my son a couple weeks ago and I'm actually a grandfather now watching my granddaughter approach nine months at this point and we were talking about how the pediatricians said what little kids do is they focus on one developmental task, and that could be crawling or could be babbling, or, but they really work on doing that until they become an expert on it and then they move on to the next.
Speaker 1:And those two kind of thoughts came to mind as I was reading what you wrote and what my son was talking to me about and I went hey, there's something in there about becoming an expert in an area and then moving on after that. And if I were to look at my own career progression, I would say early, early in my career, I was an expert you know, believe it or not at this point in computers and programming and kind of made a little name for myself. And then analysis of data which moved into planning, which moved into market research, which moved, etc. Etc. And I think there's some level of truth to that, compared to trying to be the jack of all trades and just some of your thoughts around there.
Speaker 2:I appreciate hearing From a just was on a family trip and my kids got sick and we passed them off to grandparents, and so congratulations on being a grandparent and thank you for your service on behalf of your son and family. There is some magic, I think, to time and effort, and so I say that when doing one thing at one time and there's certainly now at this stage of my career and probably at all stages I sort of did a few things at a few times. But I think that the time and effort aspect my very first hospital CEO boss during my administrative fellowship, had a famous quote and had the mug that said if you don't ASK, you don't get. And so he was constantly if you don't ask, you don't get, which was was ingrained into so many of our heads and we love and appreciate him for that. But what we realized is in his position, both in the community and his personal life and in the role in the organization, is he just got so many ASKS.
Speaker 2:Always there's always someone coming up asking for more money for their department budget, for different food at the annual Christmas dinner, for different whatever it was, and you start to notice a pattern in who you say yes to at an executive level. And so if you come in, just in the basic sense, if you were a department lead, and you come up to the CEO, main executive, setting the budget and you say, hey, I want more money for my department, and they say, why? And you're like I just, I want more money, I don't have enough money, like whatever it is. You can just imagine already in your head like it's very hard to say yes to that. But if you come up and you say, hey, we need more money for our department because we've tried XYZ, we've done this for two years, we've looked at other organizations that do this, they're doing so, and so you have that whole why and logic and here's the work we've put into it. It's so much easier for him to say yes.
Speaker 2:And so if you just extrapolate that to every other aspect of life if you're looking for a job, or if you're an, or if you're a student, and you're saying, hey, I want to stand out amongst my peers and I want to do this type of job, if you're, if you're, if the ask is, hey, I want this job, but the why behind it is because I want it, or because it pays more than others, or because if the why behind it is, I've put two years or six months or six weeks, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:I've put this amount of time and effort into learning about people who do this job. I've interviewed them, I've talked to them. I went over to this organization and knocked on the door and found out a little bit more. I've put together a guide for other students who might want this job. I've done things, and so I think there there's magic in that time and effort that goes into, usually one thing at a time, and so if you're known for hey, that's the one thing you did, you're probably able to do the next thing too, and so some of that bet and some of that yes that people will say to you is based off of your ever in the beginning.
Speaker 1:No, it's, it's so true, and being an acknowledged expert in one area but being able to pivot and kind of help and assist in other areas is certainly something to kind of move forward. And I also it's interesting from a Cami perspective when we look for people on our boards. What we're looking for our experts in one area, but who also can kind of take that level of expertise and apply it to higher education or apply it to health care management or to students or or to the like, and that ability to kind of draw connections in between there is important. Now you mentioned something else too Importance of finding people to root for you in your corner. And how can, how can, students find people to root for them?
Speaker 2:You mentioned crying earlier. I think I've cried at every young health leader so they always say, like when I get a microphone I cry, it's because I'm so grateful for the people that we've seen. It's been me and Antoine quite a bit, that have been the final deliverers of some checks and some brands that we've been able to work with, to go out and give those sponsorship dollars. We get to be this sort of handoff. The tears that come from community members usually are directed at us. It's been just incredible what a little bit of money or a little bit of time, a little bit of resource can do to people's lives and how much it changes them.
Speaker 2:You asked this question how students position themselves to find people rooting their corner. I think, unfortunately, the answer is going to be trial and error. You almost have to surround yourself with enough people or put yourself out there enough times that you will find those people. I think one thing that I see early in a career that's so unfortunate to me is, as a student, oftentimes going back to that conference networking standpoint. It's oftentimes networking up the first person that gives you time, that is externally successful to you, whether that's by lifestyle or title or salary, whatever it might be. I see students fall into a trap of I'm going to listen to everything this person says because they have maybe portions or aspects that I want, whether it's title, salary, whatever. I see people start making life decisions based on this person's telling me this and it got them to where they're going and so I want to do this, even though their own expectations, reality, skill set, passions, all the things may be so completely opposed to that person that's giving them the advice. Some of it is. I think you've got to find people that are going to root for you. Some of that again is trial and error. I give you the example.
Speaker 2:I've switched careers and career paths a few times and been recruited to organizations. I've searched out organizations on my own and so I've had some of those different opportunities. In one case, I had a wonderful experience with my boss, a great relationship in things. It was hard to say hey. You have to have that crucial conversation one day of hey. I found another job and it's looking like it progressed far enough that I'm going to have to say yes to their offer. It means I'm going to have to leave this team and organization and put her in a tough spot.
Speaker 2:I had that tough conversation with a boss one day and the reaction was I'm so excited for you. Me and my husband and my family want to take your family out to dinner to celebrate. Imagine that I'm putting the organization her, whatever, and it's not that I'm so important that I'm putting them in a tough bind, but they have to recruit someone new. They have a little bit of time out of their schedule to now have to figure out a new person on the team, all the things.
Speaker 2:But I've had that experience of we want to take your family out to celebrate you getting a new job and maybe they were celebrating me leaving the team. I guess that could be the other answer. But I've also had the experience of leaving a job and having a boss call people in that new job and sort of not bad mouth but not be as excited for me as possible, or to say hey, he's leaving the team because of this or hey, he's leaving this organization because of this, or so you really start to see some differences in the way people react around you to the different life choices that you make and you want to find people that are going to take you out to dinner when you win.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is an interesting part of life when you kind of do that, and I've had that same situation where I've said to people, hey, I'm going to, and the general feeling when they say, wow, congratulations, this sounds like a great move for you. Anything I can do to help you along in that part, let me know, is just a wonderful feeling to kind of have, and I'm sure, alex, you've had more of those than the latter. I have to say this has been a great conversation. I've enjoyed getting to know you the past couple of weeks in a little more detail. I have to say, talking to you it makes you feel more optimistic about where we're going as a society and what people like you are doing to make health care better and to make everyone else better. So, alex, with that, thank you very much for being on our podcast and appreciate all you do.
Speaker 2:Anthony, thank you so much. I really appreciate this rooting for you, rooting for Kami and rooting for all the students. If I can just say one last thing, I think so many students are looking for advice when they just need someone to give them confidence, and so I think there's a lot right now that are going through school saying I don't feel, or going through the first few years of their career or whatever it is, saying I don't feel like I'm on the right path or I'm not making a difference in my role, I want a bigger title, I want whatever. And a lot of them are looking for advice of hey, tell me what to do.
Speaker 2:And I think, in so many of the cases of students that I talk to, you're doing so much more than any student I've ever seen and you're doing amazing things and you're in incredible opportunities and you're doing things. So sometimes it's just give it a little time, give it a little bit more of a runway of what you're doing and where you're doing. Follow those pulls versus pushes and so the things you're pulled to. But so much of it is just confidence. I think students are absolutely incredible, are making such a difference in the world, so much more than they know so often and they're contributing ideas and the world is going to be so much better because of what they create and what we get to experience with them. And so just that advice first confidence. If we can just give that little dose of optimism to people day by day, I think I'm excited to experience the world that I've seen students talk about and what they're creating, alex great advice and be confident in yourself, and I think you'll go go further.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great advice for students. Well, with that, alex, thank you again very much for being part of the call.