Chief resident Mary Mason, M.D., shows ninth-graders at
Southwest High School in St. Louis the diseased lung of a
smoker. She visited the school as part of "Slam the Brakes
on Tobacco," an anti-smoking campaign she initiated.
Mary Mason: applying business lessons to medicine
By Nancy BeltTo track the success of Mary Mason, M.D., you'd need a patient chart, a community-service chart, a Nielsen chart and a flow chart. For the past two years, she's worked to earn a master of business administration degree (M.B.A.) at the John M. Olin School of Business, keeping up her physician duties all the while. Her juggling act also included initiating and participating with resident physicians in nationwide anti-smoking campaigns and creating and presenting medical segments on cable television.
Even while a full-time business student last year, Mason worked two nights a week at Barnes-Jewish Hospital as a hospitalist, a physician hired by primary physicians to cover their private patients in the hospital. "Since the hours were 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and I had a class at 8 a.m., it was hard," she said, "but I was concerned that I might lose my medical skills if I didn't keep practicing them."
