Raphael Garcia

University of Washington, Foster School of Business

“Servant leader and Army veteran giving back to the community that shaped me. Ancora Imparo.”

Age: 31

Hometown: Villa Park, Illinois

Fun fact about yourself: Outside of work, I keep a creative practice that spans contemporary/lyrical/modern/hip-hop dance, oil paints, a camera, and a notebook for poems. Creativity and expression aren’t hobbies for me; they’re how I process the world, and I think clearer after I move and after I make something with my hands. I always have.

Undergraduate School and Degree:

• S. in Biology (with minors in Chemistry and Business), Maryville University of Saint Louis
• S. in Geological Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Where are you currently working?

• Assistant Chief, Prosthetic and Sensory Aid Service, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
• Planning Commissioner, City of Olympia

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? My proudest professional moments aren’t on a performance report; they’re in the people I’ve been lucky enough to serve. In the U.S. Army, I had the chance to lead Soldiers through deployments, training cycles, and the long, quiet work of growing junior leaders. What stays with me is watching the young soldiers I trained come into their own and seeing those I supported through elite training programs become the leaders they had set out to be. Mentorship is the slowest, most invisible work a leader does – and the most consequential. That throughline now carries into my work at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The veteran who needs a wheelchair, a prosthetic, an oxygen unit, a sensory aid, or an adaptation to their home or vehicle is often someone I could’ve served alongside, or led, or learned from. What I’m most proud of is that I’ve never stopped being someone’s advocate, from the junior leaders coming up behind me to the veterans my team helps get back on their feet today. The work has always been about people. No matter where my professional journey takes me, I’ll always be looking for ways to help others and leave every organization and team better than when I arrived.

Why did you choose this school’s online MBA program? I wasn’t looking for a degree. I needed an MBA that could fit a life already in motion: full-time federal work, civic service, and the family and community commitments that don’t pause for a master’s program. Foster’s Hybrid MBA was one of the only online programs that didn’t ask me to choose. It made it possible to be a full-time grad student and a full-time professional at the same time, without pretending those two worlds wouldn’t overlap. They did, all the time. That was the point. The quarterly on-campus immersions also put me in a room with other working professionals whose lives looked a lot like mine, even though our backgrounds were wildly different.

Foster’s purpose statement starts with “Together.” That showed up in my C8 cohort, who kept showing up for each other on weekday nights, even when one of us was traveling for work or tending to our families. It also showed up in the way Foster connected us to real Pacific Northwest organizations, working on problems that mattered to them rather than cases on paper. Foster’s stated values are integrity above all, excellence in all we do, and inclusiveness and respect for others. The school operates that way. The online/hybrid format made the MBA possible. What made it worth doing was the people Foster put me next to.

What was your favorite part of being in an online MBA program? The people. Foster’s Hybrid format pulled together a cohort I never would’ve met in a residential program. I was the only civilian federal worker among military members, private-sector leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs from across the country. So, for two years I was the one explaining how the federal government works to people who’d only seen it from the outside and listening to how the private sector handles problems I’d been wrestling with from the inside. Both directions of that conversation made me better at my job.

The other piece was Singapore. Foster doesn’t treat the Hybrid MBA as a stripped-down version of the residential Full-Time MBA program. International study trips were open to online/hybrid students, too. We [hybrid MBA students] spent the summer in rooms with founders and executives running businesses across Southeast Asia, watching how some organizations work by very different rules than the ones I knew. I came back to the Pacific Northwest thinking differently about my own work and impact.

How did your online MBA experience compare with your in-the-classroom experience as an undergraduate student? Undergrad was a different world. I was pre-med, working toward becoming an optometrist, a physical therapist, or a physician assistant. Most of my time went into labs and lecture halls, memorizing organic chemistry pathways, anatomy diagrams, and biological processes – the kind of information you must know to pass the next exam. The rest went into sports, student clubs, service trips, and Model UN delegations. All of it was student life. Being a student was the only job I had.

The Foster School of Business has been a different kind of full. I’ve been a full-time federal employee and a full-time grad student at the same time, which meant the work I did during the day followed me to class at night. I’d bring a real organizational problem from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and I’d bounce solutions off my classmates, trying to build a framework. The online classroom experience as a full-time federal employee is nothing like it was as a young pre-med student. I bring fewer answers now, and better questions.

How has your online MBA education helped you in your current job? Did you earn a promotion while in the program or immediately after graduation? Yes. In October 2025, mid-MBA, I was promoted from a Front Office Lead Management Analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) to an Assistant Chief of Prosthetic and Sensory Aid Service with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The new role moved me from the VBA’s claims side to the VHA’s healthcare side, which is the same population I’d been serving, just at a different point in their lives.

The MBA timing wasn’t accidental. I was suddenly applying accounting frameworks to real, aged purchase orders, using change-management language to optimize how my team operates, and thinking strategically about my programs rather than making one decision at a time. The MBA also sharpened my communication as a leader. I write tighter briefs for senior leadership. I run cleaner one-on-ones. I frame recommendations with strategy first, then operations. None of that came from the textbook. It came from showing up to class with the actual problems I would face the next week.

Why did you pursue an online MBA program instead of a full-time residential or executive MBA program? First, I wasn’t willing to step away from a federal career I was building or from the local community I’d committed to serving. A residential program would’ve meant pausing both for two years. An executive MBA at most peer schools would’ve meant relocating or losing weekends to commute to a different city. Neither was a real option.

Second, age and stage. I’m 31. I’d already built a career, a role, and a community I cared about. I needed an MBA that fit alongside the work I was already doing and sharpened how I did it. Foster’s Hybrid format gave me real classroom time on campus during the quarterly in-person immersions, plus weekly online live sessions the rest of the time. I didn’t pick Foster’s Hybrid because residential wasn’t an option. I picked it because it was the right one for where I am in life.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Foster doesn’t have one AI policy. Each professor sets their own rules, which sounds messy, but pushed me to use the AI tools differently depending on what the work called for.

The clearest example was our entrepreneurship venture project. My team used generative AI as a devil’s advocate. We’d feed it our value proposition, our assumptions about the customer, our pricing logic, and ask it to argue the other side. We asked questions like, “Why wouldn’t a customer pay for this? What’s the cheapest substitute? Where do unit economics break?” The generative AI platforms didn’t tell us our ideas were bad. They surfaced the questions we’d been quietly avoiding because we were attached to the answer.

For a digital marketing strategy brief on Energizer’s new Ultimate Child Shield battery, we used AI in a different way. We’d already drafted the strategy, so we used it to pressure-test what we had, asking it to play a skeptical brand manager, then a skeptical customer, then a competitor. Same AI tools, different job.

What I took from this is that AI tools are most useful when you assign roles and build constraints into your prompts, and not when you ask it to produce a finished product. If I can’t articulate what I’m trying to figure out, the AI just gives me a polished version of my own confusion. Writing a real prompt is most of the value. The output is almost a byproduct.

Number of Hours Per Week Spent on an Online MBA: Anywhere from 20-to-30+ hours per week on average, with peaks at 40 hours during heavy case studies and team project deadlines.

What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to be a good leader who helps people. That’s it. The organization, the title, and the agency are the variables. What stays constant is the kind of leader I want to keep becoming. I think a lot about the veterans who come through our office. Most of them are tired by the time they get to us. Some are carrying injuries they didn’t expect to be carrying. A wheelchair, a prosthetic, a hearing aid, an adapted vehicle. Those aren’t items on a procurement list. They’re how somebody gets their independence back. I want to keep building teams and programs that treat people that way. I want to keep doing community work that leaves someone with more access, more resources, or more dignity than they had before our paths crossed. If I’m doing that ten years from now, I won’t care what’s on my business card.

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