Kicking off Season 2
October 3, 2021
Corrine Marquardt, Student Chair
TL;DR: We are excited to kick off the second season of healthtech hunches. Our mission to help the next generation of talent enter digital health remains the same. We will continue our speaker series, introduce a new focus on community building, and elevate student voices and ownership through our new Student Leadership Committee. We hope that you will join us on Slack and for a future event!
Our Story
Digital health is booming (with record-breaking funding in the space!) and there is a need for more talent; however, it can be difficult to enter the field. healthtech hunches was founded to help the next generation of talent enter digital health. We provide resources to help MBA and MD students learn about various digital health career paths, ask their burning questions in a personable space, and meet others who are passionate about health technology.
You can read more about why healthtech hunches was created here and here.
Figure 1: In only its first 6 months, 2021 has already been a record-setting fundraising year, with average deal size rising to $39.6M. Read more in Rock Health’s latest funding report.
As we enter our second year of healthtech hunches, we are excited to share with you our vision and goals for the 2021-2022 academic year, as well as introduce you to our new Student Leadership Committee.
Goal 1: Connect Students with Digital Health Professionals
healthtech hunches is centered on connecting students with digital health professionals in a forum that is personal, time-efficient, and accessible to students from a wide range of geographic locations, skills, and experiences. Last year, we coordinated 24 fireside chats with professionals from a diverse set of companies (ranging from startups to well-known names) and professional backgrounds (e.g. product management, business development, user research, etc.).
To those who joined us as a speaker last year, thank you! This program would not be possible without our volunteers, including our speakers who generously share their time and wisdom with our student community!
This year, we will continue to connect students with professionals. In addition to our fireside chat events where we invite leaders to share their career journey and advice, we also plan to host a couple panel events with recent alumni and students, focused on providing more near-term advice on recruiting for summer and post-graduation roles in digital health. Our team is dedicated to inviting speakers with diverse expertise and lived experiences. If you have a speaker recommendation for healthtech hunches, please email us at healthtechhunches@gmail.com.
Goal 2: Foster a Community of Students Across MBA and MD Programs
Last year, healthtech hunches brought together a community of more than 500 professionals and students, all interested in health technology. Following the end of our programming last spring, the team reviewed attendee feedback and interviewed our student ambassadors to understand where we could make improvements in our second year. Repeatedly, we heard that students want opportunities to connect more directly with fellow healthtech enthusiasts across school programs.
In response to this feedback, our team is planning to facilitate more cross-program engagement through two avenues.
First, we have relaunched our Slack environment where we will facilitate more 1:1 connections and support information sharing across different programs and networks. As is the case with any community, it blossoms when members give more than they receive. We hope you will join us in contributing to and engaging with the different content shared on Slack.
Secondly, we will be adding community-focused events to our programming this semester, designed to help participants get to know each other better. More information about these events will be shared soon and we hope to see you all there!
As an aside, you may wonder why we focus on MBA and MD students. We focused on a single cohort to start (MBA students) in an effort to provide a tailored experience, and realized that MD students often have similar questions, so we expanded the intended audience to include MD students. That said, the community is open, and we have had law, policy, public health, and engineering students as well as working professionals join us. All are welcome!
Goal 3: Elevate Student Voices & Ownership
As we look to grow healthtech hunches and offer new programming this year, we are introducing a new leadership structure that will help us sustainably scale and more directly reflect student voices. This year, we are excited to stand up and introduce our first Student Leadership Committee (SLC)!
Brian Weil (Duke, MBA) and David Mui (UPenn, MD/MBA) serve as our Speaker Events Leads and are hard at work to coordinate our AMA Fireside Chats and panel events. Lindy Holts (USC, MBA) and Reilly Dever (Duke, MBA & MD) are our Community Leads, passionate about facilitating personal connection through our Slack Channel and community events. Finally, as the Student Chair, I (Corrine Marquardt, Berkeley, MBA) am excited to help define our strategic vision for the year working with the other leads and the community at large, as well as support our programming efforts and leadership transitions.
Figure 2: Our Student Leadership Committee is excited to collect student feedback and lead healthtech hunches planning efforts. Learn more about our SLC Leaders here.
Our Student Ambassadors represent healthtech hunches in their respective programs and help us to promote and moderate our events.
We also select a Student Moderator for each of our speaker events and usually try to select these moderators based on shared professional interest with the speaker. We welcome other students and community members to get involved. If you would like to be considered for a future ambassador or moderator role, please reach out!
Carolyn Casterton will continue to be involved as an advisor to the SLC and will help maintain continuity as the SLC members change each year.
Figure 3: Our Student Ambassadors help promote hh events to their communities and represent their classmates in providing feedback to the SLC. Get to know them better here.
What’s Next
Join our Slack and subscribe for our newsletter – these are our two best ways of letting you know what’s coming from week to week!
Student Volunteers: We are seeking student ambassadors and moderators from across programs (especially if you see your school is not already represented). Please reach out if you are interested in volunteering! Ambassador responsibilities are here and the current team is here.
We want to hear your feedback on what you most want to see in this forum. We will send out feedback surveys at multiple points in the year and post polls in Slack but we always welcome your feedback.
We look forward to “seeing” you at one of our upcoming events. Questions? Feedback? We’d love to hear from you!
Corrine (Student Chair)
Contact: healthtechhunches@gmail.com