Kerone Wint

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

“Jamaican doctor and creative that is passionate about redesigning healthcare.”

Hometown: St Catherine, Jamaica

Fun Fact About Yourself: Many people thought I would have gone to art school instead of medical school.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of the West Indies, Mona; Medicine and Surgery (2014)

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Kingston Public Hospital (JM); Medical Officer II in Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery

What has been your first impression of the Wharton MBA students and alumni you’ve met so far. Tell us your best Wharton story so far.  Humble, collaborative, and adaptive. One highlight was hearing Dr. David Fajgenbaum tell his inspiring story about his journey of chasing a cure after being diagnosed with a rare disease; it was a story of becoming the hope you need.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of the Wharton School’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? The Healthcare Management Program was the key reason I chose Wharton. Coming from a clinical background, I found it important to be part of a group of people passionate about improving healthcare. The HCM program placed me into a diverse and dedicated group of faculty, current students, and alumni that share that interest.

What course, club, or activity excites you the most at the Wharton School? I am keen to expand my interests and experiences during my time at Wharton. So as someone that has never experienced snow, I am excited to join the Ski & Snowboarding Club, and Ice Hockey Club and try something distinctly different.

When you think of the Wharton School, what is the first word that comes to mind? Why? Intentional. From my experiences thus far, I perceive the Wharton School to be committed to optimizing the MBA experience for its community—from prospective students to alumni. They’ve streamlined processes to increase accessibility and fairness and are very data-driven to continually improve programming to better serve our goals—academic, professional, and social.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Lack of surgical access in developing countries has long been documented to significantly impact their human capital. Because contributing to the progress toward health equity is important to me, a standout accomplishment was that I was able to spearhead a project at a leading public hospital in Jamaica to improve burn wound care for patients with significant burn wounds in a low resource setting and in a decentralized, open surgical ward distribution.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point and what do you hope to do after graduation? Based on my experiences, I have had a growing desire over the years to have a more systems-level impact on healthcare. By the time of the most recent pandemic, it became something I couldn’t ignore. The recent pandemic exposed inefficiencies in the healthcare ecosystem, but it also revealed our resilience and commitment to improving continuously. I saw a reinvigorated push to innovate and redesign healthcare to serve our populations better, and I wanted to be a part of that push. I saw the MBA as a doorway to improve the value I can bring to the world at scale.

My mission is to use my empathy, curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking to continually innovate models, processes, products and services in order to empower optimizing the potential of others at scale, especially the overlooked and marginalized. After graduation, I plan to continue walking along that path within healthcare and ultimately pursue healthcare entrepreneurship to build something that empowers people to live more optimally.

What is one thing you have recently read, watched, or listened to that you would highly recommend to prospective MBAs? Why? I think The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel Pink is a relevant book for prospective and current MBAs. It presents a decision-making framework called the Regret Optimization Framework, which in some variation was used by Jeff Bezos to found Amazon and, more recently, Blake Scholl to found Boom. I’ve used some variation of it throughout my life and have found that it really helps with making those big decisions between multiple opportunities, especially when it involves paths that are not well-trodden. As a prospective MBA candidate, you will have increasingly more decisions to make with stricter time constraints and more significant tradeoffs. So thinking about how to approach those moments beforehand really helps.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? HBS, Stanford GSB, MIT Sloan, and UC Berkeley Haas

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into the Wharton School’s MBA program?

1. Do not self-select out. I almost did. And view the journey as an opportunity for deep introspection and growth.

1. Find your tribe at Wharton’s MBA program, reach out, and connect—through the Admissions Fellows and Affinity groups. This was an integral part of my process.
2. 1. Optimize your GMAT score
   2. Craft your resume to show (not tell) the value you can bring to the Wharton community by the value you brought to wherever you are now or were.
   3. Craft your essays to be as potent as possible by displaying a relevant curation of your experiences that evoke emotion and deliver content, presenting clear goals that are connected to your experiences, and showing how specifically Wharton can fit into your story.
   4. Coach your recommenders: research and educate them on Wharton’s values; create a document that reminds them of your highlights.Give yourself the best shot you can by focusing on what you can control presently.

 

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