Summer Intern Spotlight: Hebah Ibreak at EY

Every summer, Goizueta Business School students from all programs step out of the classroom and into internships at companies around the world. These experiences are not just about gaining practical skills; they often lead to lasting memories, powerful insights, and sometimes even job offers.

In this series, we’ll highlight students who completed exciting internships this summer, sharing their journeys, challenges, and triumphs. Stay tuned to discover the incredible work our students have been involved in and the valuable lessons they’ve learned along the way. 

Here, we speak with Hebah Ibreak 27MBA/MPH, who spent her summer as a Healthcare Consulting Intern at EY (Ernst & Young).

Tell us a little about yourself and what interested you in pursuing this internship opportunity.

My background is primarily in behavioral health. I was originally interested in clinical psychology and going the provider route.  I started working with clinicians and taking on more office management and business-related roles; I realized that I enjoyed the work involved in removing the barriers that got in the way of providers being able to do the work they wanted to do. I was doing it at a much smaller scale, working with individual clinics to optimize processes and operational structures so that clinicians could have a better-running practice and focus on being a good doctor instead of having to run a business. That’s what initially drew me to consulting, because it would let me do this at a much larger scale and with much more impact.

I was interested in EY specifically because they had a designated health service line. At most consulting firms, health is an industry you can specialize in, but at EY it was its own separate service line, alongside finance, business transformation, and supply chain, with health carved out on its own. Everyone in that service line was completely focused on health and almost everyone has worked in industry. Most of my colleagues were previously nurses, providers, or hospital staff. So everybody involved was extremely health-focused and health-oriented, which was extremely appealing to me.

What were your primary responsibilities, and what did a typical day look like?

I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to work on two workstreams within a single project. Our overall engagement was working with a major health system, and I was placed initially as a project manager. Because of how large the engagement was, they needed a dedicated project manager to make sure everything was running smoothly, since there was a considerable number of consultants across five different workstreams. I got the bird’s-eye view of everything, from the financial expenses of the entire project, to how we reported out to the client each week and every month, to the overall phased rollout.

A lot of my responsibilities centered around project governance and putting out fires as they came up. I coordinated one of our on-sites, developed tracking tools to monitor project performance and financial metrics for ongoing expenses, and built weekly reporting decks. Then there were the smaller fires, like our master slide deck colors being randomly altered in the middle of the project.

Halfway through, I also pushed to be part of a specific workstream focused on volume growth. I was able to work through a project and really get those “core consulting skills”.  I spent my day tracking metrics, reviewing patient facing documents, analyzing  referral patterns and highlighted key findings in order to pin point areas of pain and opportunity within certain service lines. 

So day to day, I was juggling both teams, checking in with both of my managers, and making sure I fully understood what my role looked like on each side. My PMO side was more flexible and depended on what issues came up that week. The other workstream was more consistent, with a defined rollout that we moved through as we progressed through the problem-solving process. 

Can you share a project, assignment, or experience from the internship that stood out to you?

The project that really stood out to me was within the volume growth work. I was able to hone in on one specific problem within the workstream, where we looked at cancellations and no-shows for a specific service line and tried to identify the root cause and how to address the issue. We tackled it from every angle. I took the lead on updating the patient-facing documentation and creating an interview guide for staff who worked within the system to get a better understanding of the internal scheduling process. Then used all of the research and data we produced and gathered to create a process flow chart and actionable insights. From there we built an actual plan that detailed pain points, opportunities, and how we could move forward to implement something that would decrease these cancellations. This entire process was only two weeks but we were able to gather so much information and progress so quickly. What made it meaningful was knowing that the work wasn’t just an exercise. We were building something the health system could actually implement to reduce cancellations, which ultimately means more patients getting the care they need. 

What skills or knowledge from your Goizueta experience were you able to apply in your role?

I came into business school without an academic background in business, having mostly learned things hands-on from working in offices. So most of the classes we took were integral, because I was at such a high level in project management. I was dealing with finance, a bit of accounting, strategy, and almost everything we had learned in our classes, and it was all very relevant to my internship.

Something that was extremely crucial for me was my IMPACT experience with Professor Omar Rodriguez. He always pushed my team and me to keep asking “so what” every single time we got any type of data. That was really important  this summer as I was constantly working with large data sets that needed to be synthesized. The more data I was able to work with, the more Excel sheets and information I got to keep practicing with, the better I got at knowing what to do with large sets of information and how to focus on what the message is and who that message is for.

How has this internship influenced your career interests, and what advice would you give other students pursuing similar opportunities?

I had never done consulting before, and I am definitely interested in consulting after this internship. It was a very valuable experience to spend the summer being treated as and working as though I was an actual senior staffed at EY.

As for advice, I think it’s important for anybody in a similar position to truly assess if this is the right fit for them. I enjoy consulting, but I also enjoy it through the specific lens I got to experience it this past summer, which was through health. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much if I wasn’t on a health team, or if I wasn’t surrounded by people who are as mission-focused within this industry as the people at EY are. Those things are extremely important to me. So as you’re navigating your career interests and what you want, you have to ask yourself what is driving and motivating you to do this type of work. Consulting can have long hours, it can be frustrating, and it can be difficult, and you need to really know what your driver is.

These internships are a great opportunity to make sure this is something you actually want to do. You can come out of it feeling like consulting isn’t for you, and that’s okay too. You’ll still have learned these skills and picked up something from the experience that helped you over the summer, even if it isn’t your path. It’s always important to take every opportunity, learn as much as you can, and still decide what is best for you personally, not just what might look best on your resume.

Explore more exciting student internships and the experiences that shaped their summer! Discover more here.

Interested in exploring Full-Time MBA opportunities? Learn more about Goizueta’s Full-Time MBA program.