Dr. Simone Cummings, recently named the new dean of the Walker School of Business and Technology at Webster University, became intrigued with business at a young age, as she watched her father go to work as a marketing executive for Anheuser Busch.
Growing up, she remembers tagging along to her father’s focus groups. She would sit in the back room and watch the moderators interact with people who were testing the different products.
“I thought, ‘Okay, this is pretty cool,'” says Cummings. “He seemed to have a great job. He always had tickets to concerts for me and events that they were sponsoring. And I thought, this is something that I’d like to do with my life, too.”
After taking an organizational behavior course at Washington University in Saint Louis, Cummings learned from her professor that there are fewer layers of management at hospitals then at huge corporations. At the time, Cummings desired to eventually become a CEO of an organization, and working in hospital administration was the fastest way for her to reach that goal.
Cummings worked for Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis Regional Hospital and Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C. However, after 12-hour workdays and being on call during the weekends, she felt that the hospital environment was not ultimately for her.
“I was sitting in line to the CEO [at Columbia Hospital] and I was in the administrative suite, so I was really well on my way to moving up into the CEO position,” says Cummings. “But while I was there, I found that I worked a whole lot. I was on call a lot on the weekends and I just felt like I didn’t have much of a life.”
After leaving the hospital, Cummings followed her passion for research and made the decision to go back to school for her doctorate, earning her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
