As the inaugural dean of George Mason University’s College of Public Health, Melissa Perry will confer around 850 degrees to students during this week’s graduation ceremonies. But one GMU graduation ceremony will be special — her own.
After years of experience in public health and higher education, Perry decided in 2019, at age 54, to pursue an MBA. She’ll graduate from GMU’s Costello College of Business this week.
“I was in academic leadership for about a decade. And realized that I really was trained to be a scientist,” Perry says. “I was trained to be a public health expert. I was trained to consume data, to understand, to interpret, to communicate. But I wasn’t trained to lead a small- or medium- or a large-size organization.”
Prior to this MBA, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Vermont and a Master of Health Sciences and Doctor of Science. Both degrees were from Johns Hopkins University. For her, the decision to return to school in a new field was a way to model a growth mindset and a commitment to lifelong learning.
Studying Hard
Perry began her MBA studies at George Washington University while she was a department chair there. When she took the position as the head of GMU’s College of Public Health, she also transferred as a student. She knew that continuing the degree would be a major commitment of time and effort.
“It wasn’t easy at all,” she says. After long days working as the dean, she’d head to class in the evenings to work on her degree, all while raising two children. “It was challenging, but I felt as though the majority of things that I was learning, I was able to apply as a dean,” Perry says.
And there was no special treatment, she says. When it came to attendance, homework, and exams, she was “very much a student.”
Applying Knowlege
As she took her MBA coursework, she looked for ways to implement the things she was learning to her work. “From the finances to managing change to strategic directions, I was always looking for ways to apply [the coursework],” she says.
This new degree will help her lead the College of Public Health in a “people-focused” way. It will also help her be more adaptive and resilient to changing technologies, she says.
While the two disciplines seem to be vastly different, Perry understands how business principles can impact public health.
Take, for example, someone leading a hospital. “You’re finding ways to ensure that people get easy, equitable, timely, relevant access to healthcare,” she says. “The only way you’re going to do that if you really understand how to access people and how to access populations, and also how to lead teams. Those are all skills that you don’t learn, let’s say, in an epidemiology degree. … You’re going to learn it in a business-oriented degree.”
A Student’s Perspective
Plus, the experience gives her more insight into what the student experience is like today. “It’s given me profound insight into how, too often, inadvertently, our systems can be inefficient — not unique to George Mason, but just as big organizations, big universities. So, understanding where the student can be lost, it’s given me insight into how we avoid that,” she says.
As an alumna, she’ll share the knowledge and experience she gained throughout the process with her fellow university leaders. She says her goal is to “provide perspectives on things that we can adjust, we can engineer, we can optimize, to ensure that at every chance that we get, we can be designing for that student experience.”
Feature image of Melissa Perry by Artan Marku, courtesy George Mason University
