Zicklin MBA Is a Baruch Changemaker—and an Immigrants’ Dream Maker

Stefanie Trice Gill (MBA, ’06) started her company because of a chance encounter with a janitor.  

After earning an Executive MBA in Healthcare Administration (EMBA HCA) from the Zicklin School, the native Mainer had returned to her home state to raise her family. One morning in 2018, as she was walking to lunch at Maine Medical Center, where she oversaw Interpreter and Cross-Cultural Services, she spotted a “distinguished-looking” African man mopping the floors.  

Stefanie, who speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Mandarin, knew that Maine had recently seen an influx of refugees and asylum seekers from Angola, a former Portuguese colony in southwestern Africa. “I went up to him and said in Portuguese, ‘Sir, please tell me what you did for work in your country, because I know you weren’t cleaning floors.’. He replied, in perfect English, ‘I’m a geophysicist.’” 

“He and I looked at each other and both got tears in our eyes,” Stefanie remembers. She had already met many people like him: internationally trained professionals with experience in accounting, engineering, and tech, who were working as housekeepers, cleaners, Uber drivers, and at other low-skilled jobs. But this geophysicist was the tipping point. Stefanie decided to start an employment agency. 

A year later, Stefanie placed that geophysicist-turned-janitor in a geology job “cleaning the ocean floor” with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  Stefanie is founder and principal recruiter for IntWork, a diversity recruiting firm that narrows Maine’s skills gap by matching employers with diverse professionals, primarily refugees and asylum seekers, who can help fill key roles vacant due to the state’s “brain drain” and aging workforce. 

Stefanie credits her time in the EMBA HCA program with helping her design solutions for cross-cultural challenges. She enrolled at Zicklin in 2003 after being recruited to lead language access programs for Queens public hospitals because NYC Health + Hospitals were being investigated by the Office of Civil Rights for failing to provide adequate healthcare services for patients with limited English proficiency. 

“Every project I did at Zicklin was focused on solving real-life problems and improving language access across New York City’s public hospitals,” Stefanie notes. 

One of her first operations projects was focused on increasing access to interpreter services in Queens. As interpreter costs increased, she did a subsequent project that demonstrated that paying for staff interpreters was more cost effective than providing those services through outside vendors. That academic analysis resulted in Elmhurst Hospital establishing staff interpreter roles. 

For her capstone project, she designed a citywide plan to help New York City hospitals standardize interpreter services systemwide and develop economies of scale. New York City public hospitals’ CEO, Alan Aviles, promoted her to implement this plan, resulting in improved access and reduced costs citywide. As part of this, Stefanie partnered with Hostos Community College to standardize all interpreter training programs across CUNY so that interpreters no longer needed to be re-tested and re-trained by hospitals once hired. 

In September, Stefanie was honored with a Baruch Changemakers Award for her lifetime achievements. The Zicklin School’s Willem Kooyker Dean, Bruce W. Weber, called her story “an inspiring example of business education being used to address seemingly intractable societal challenges.” 

And yet, transitioning from New York back to her home state of Maine was challenging. Despite having had a successful career in New York—and despite Maine having an acute workforce shortage—she encountered many closed doors. “I went on interviews and was told I wasn’t qualified because I didn’t have ‘Maine experience,’” Stefanie laughs. “And I grew up in Maine! Imagine if I had a foreign degree or work experience, an unusual last name or accent, or was from another country. I knew this small-town approach had to change for the Maine economy to thrive.” 

In developing IntWork’s unique employer-funded model, she drew inspiration from Upwardly Global, a NYC-based nonprofit organization that works with internationally trained professionals. She also got support from Maine’s startup and immigrant communities. 

Now in the sixth year of IntWork, Stefanie has been opening doors for those who came after her, helping her home state’s economy and forging a more welcoming and inclusive Maine. 

Categories: Alumni News, News