Consultant Sora Al Rowas, MHCM ’27, keeps pace with career while earning a Harvard Chan degree
Sora Al Rowas is rarely in one place for long. The business she co-founded, Al Sorat Consulting, keeps her traveling between Bangkok, Thailand, and her home country, Oman. This summer, she added Boston to her itinerary. As a student in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s low-residency Master in Health Care Management (MHCM) program, she recently attended a three-week summer session where she connected with faculty and peers.
“The hybrid model combines the online and on-campus experience with my classmates, which really gives me the best of all the worlds,” says Al Rowas. The flexibility has enabled her to study without putting her career on hold.
MHCM students visit Harvard Chan School six times per year during their two-year-long course of study. The rest of the program’s coursework is conducted online.
During her first visit to campus, Al Rowas made meaningful connections with her classmates. They plan to stay in touch over WhatsApp and formed study groups that they plan to keep up when they return to their home cities.
Like Al Rowas, who has worked as a clinician and health care leader, the other students in the program are mid-career physicians looking to advance their leadership skills. The MHCM program attracts chairs of hospital departments, chief medical officers, health care startup founders, and other physician leaders from across the U.S. and around the world.
Al Rowas says that classroom discussions frequently spill into the lunch hour, driven by students’ shared passion for improving health care systems for patients and providers. Al Rowas says she has already benefitted from her classmates’ wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints.
“I think my favorite thing is when I change my mind about something. One of the discussions in class actually changed my mind about how I think about physician burnout,” she says. “I learned a lot from the people that I had disagreed with and realized that I need to pay attention to that perspective.”
Al Rowas believes that the connections she has made through the program will be long-lasting and influential on her work going forward. “I now have 27 new friends and teachers and coaches and mentors for the rest of my life,” she said.
