EMBA Graduate: ‘I Feel Honored to Be Part of Such Important Work’

As an award manager in the Yale University Office of Sponsored Projects, Elizabeth Ruiz ’22 EMBA oversees a portfolio of 25 departments including the Cancer Center, Pediatrics, Geriatrics, Neurosurgery, Neurology, Surgery, and the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. Before research projects can begin, she reviews grant awards and budgets, “negotiates agreements both globally and nationally”, and is the expert adviser to chairs, senior leadership, and business office staff for the university.

Her job requires her to harness all the skills she’s developed throughout a career that has taken her from a community educator to a paralegal to an accountant and now research administrator. “I feel honored to be part of such important work and to be on the front lines of innovation and emerging scientific investigations through research administration,” she says

When things get particularly complex and fast-paced, Ruiz thinks about how her professor Patrick Gourley, Ph.D. in the Executive MBA program at the University of New Haven often said, “Take the data on a date.”

“Before any decision, you have to stop, step back and get to know the data,” she explains. “What does it tell you? Once you understand it, you can start moving forward.”

It’s just one of the many lessons from the EMBA program that she says she uses all the time in her work. One of the many great experiences the program afforded her, for example, was the final project in the program where she simulated being a company CEO and had to build a drone and camera company from the ground up, looking at everything from the kinds of lenses to use, to the quality of life the Dronergy Corporation wanted for their employees, the costs of benefits, cornering markets in Asia and Latin America, while investing in research and development. “It was intense,” she said, recalling how she would put in a full work week at Yale in a high caliber position and then spend entire weekends on the project.

Collaborating throughout the program with classmates who were diverse business professionals from across different industries and learning from faculty members and speakers who brought rich, lived experiences to the courses made Ruiz think deeply about management style. “There’s time for introspection to ask, ‘What are effective ways to go about your business, creating a team, building a community, creating your brand?’”

‘I can grab from the arsenal of knowledge’

Ruiz never would have thought of pursuing her EMBA if she hadn’t noticed that a Yale colleague had “EMBA” written after her name in an email. “I didn’t know what it was,” she said. When her colleague told her about the University of New Haven’s program, Ruiz quickly said, “I could never do that. My job’s just too busy. But she said, ‘you’re exactly who the program is designed for – a working professional.’”

So Ruiz filled out an online form to get more information. She was surprised when the then-assistant director of graduate admissions called her and told her all about the program, and they started to talk regularly. Soon after, she was talking with Michael Davis ’86 MBA, executive director of the EMBA program and a practitioner in residence, who told her about how the program encouraged its students “to think differently. And that’s what I’m about.”

By the fall of 2020, she enrolled, and she says it is one of the best decisions she ever made. The biggest gift of the program was how it imbued her with “a greater sense of confidence that many of my practices throughout my career were spot on in order to reach high levels in any profession I apply myself to.”

“I know now that if a scenario comes up, I can grab from the arsenal of knowledge I learned from my EMBA and solve it,” she says.

‘I love my work’

From her earliest years, Ruiz was always curious by nature. She wanted to know the way things worked. She’d take things apart to see what was inside. Ruiz arrived in the United States with her family from Mexico City when she was five to officially move to Norwalk, Conn. She only spoke Spanish and learned English to acclimate to her new surroundings. Though she was “the quiet student in the back who only spoke every now and then,” she was taking everything in.

When she was small, her mother worked as a professional house keeper, and she said, “I would go with her as she cleaned the houses, and I would see those homes and ask, ‘What do the people do to have this kind of life?” This led her on the path of introspection and fired up her curiosity of many potential avenues her life would take. She expresses that her parents are the foundation of her success.

Ruiz skipped a grade in elementary school and started college at age 17 at UConn, ultimately majoring in psychology and minoring in communications. At that same time, her father and uncle opened a landscaping business, so Ruiz decided to teach herself QuickBooks, tax laws, and marketing to incorporate the LLC. She essentially helped them establish their business and discovered “that I loved processes and details, and I also loved the big picture.”

Those remain her hallmarks, she says. Not long ago, in her position as awards manager, she began to wonder if some of the department processes could be improved.

Ruiz reached out to Robert Albright, Ph.D., chair of the management and hospitality and tourism departments at the University, “to discuss the visual framework for continuous process improvement to increase work efficiency and effectiveness.” She worked on her proposal and presented it to Yale’s senior associate provost and to senior leadership of the office of Research Administration. Changes were implemented and “are expected to save the university’s research administration in labor costs, reduce administrative burden, and increase productivity through teams.” She says the changes also energized the department and boosted morale.

Ruiz is proud of that achievement. “I love my work,” she says. “I feel privileged to contribute to scientific research on a global level.”