Christy Ray
M.S.H.A., 2001
Business operations manager, Children’s Hospital of Omaha
Evan Ray
M.S.H.A., 2003
Vice president, Jennie Edmundson Hospital
| Christy: “I decided at an early age that I was going to do something in health care because of multiple experiences that my family had in hospitals. But my talents were not clinically oriented—you don’t want me to stick you or diagnose you. I knew my aptitude was more toward business, so I researched it, and I figured out that administration was a fit for my personal abilities.” Evan: “After I finished my undergraduate studies, I worked for a brokerage house; I spent a little over a year working with retirement plans, stock markets, bond markets, and different investment vehicles, and I didn’t get a tremendous amount of satisfaction that I was making much of a difference. In health care, you’re facing different issues internally and externally on a daily basis, and you make an impact on a community’s health care. Those were really the two deciding factors for me.” |
Both Evan and Christy Ray found knowledge and rewarding career paths in the Master of Science in Health Administration (M.S.H.A.) Program at UAB’s School of Health Professions, but they also found their spouses—each other. They met when Christy, who had already graduated and was working at UAB Hospital at the time, was asked to speak to Evan’s class when they toured the hospital.
Christy: “I ended up helping his group with one of their projects—they needed a contact from a hospital to help them with something, and that’s how we got to know each other.”
Evan: “There were actually several relationships that got started during that time. There’s another couple in my class who got married.”
Christy: “And Vanessa Walls, who helped me to find my job here in Omaha—she and her husband are also both graduates of the UAB health administration program.”
After graduating, Christy went to work for Baptist Health System’s corporate office and then served as an administrator at Montclair Baptist (now Trinity Medical Center), where she was named to Birmingham Business Journal’s “Top 40 Under 40” list in 2006. Evan finished his residency at Brookwood Medical Center and later moved to Shelby Baptist Medical Center. For a short time, they were both working at competing institutions trying to recruit the same doctors. When the time came to seek new opportunities—with perhaps a little less direct competition—the M.S.H.A. program director at SHP guided Evan to Jennie Edmundson Hospital, an adult acute-care community hospital in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Christy found her own opportunity right across the Missouri River in Omaha, Nebraska, a short time later.
Evan: “Moving to the Midwest really hasn’t been too much of a culture shock—the cultures are very similar; both the Southeast and Midwest are very family-oriented, and both are very conservative in nature. More than anything else, we had to adjust to the weather.”
Christy: “It was below zero many days this winter, and we’ve spent a lot of time shoveling our driveway. But there are a lot of new things to see, and we’ve gotten involved in the community—I’m in the Junior League, and I teach economics at a community college; Evan’s helping a local college update its health-administration curriculum, and he’s on several boards, including Goodwill the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Midlands and Council Bluffs.
“One of the funniest things about being here was getting to witness the caucus process. Barack Obama was here a million times, and living in Iowa, we got polled on the phone a hundred times a week. It was the first time we’d ever had more than two presidential candidates to choose from.”
Both Evan and Christy remain thankful for the training that the School of Health Professions gave them and for the opportunities that the school’s faculty and alumni opened up for them. Christy says that UAB has gone out of its way to “find faculty who care about the long-term success of their students,” and their own experiences bear that out.
Evan: “The national recognition UAB has and the fact that it was close to home in the Southeast made all the difference. And the access to UAB Hospital was a major asset, too—we were both very fortunate to have the hospital administrators stay so involved in our program and give us the opportunities we were looking for.”
Christy: “More than any other place I looked at, the faculty at UAB really knew what I wanted out of my career, and they showed me how they were prepared to provide me with that growth experience; to this day, I’m still struck by how involved they are in making sure that their students are successful in a way that actually meets those students’ goals. And the alumni community is fantastic—regardless of whether their classes are 40 years apart or they’re from the same class, everybody who’s graduated from the program is interested in helping everybody else. And that’s definitely a unique culture.”