Adriana Garcia

I think it's my passion about what I do. To me, probably on the daily task, there's things that we like and things that we don't like too much. But I think having the passion and caring about making sure that you have a happy client, a happy staff - I make sure that my staff also is not only working so hard, but also that they're happy and they're okay. To me, it's the passion that drives what I do. That's my thing. If you don't have passion for it, then it's hard to work.

One of the best pieces of advice I received was that the worst question is the one that you don't ask. When I first started working here, my English wasn't as strong and I was afraid and timid because I didn't want things to come out wrong. My boss at that time told me something very important: you should be proud, because normally when you have an accent like yours, it's because you speak more than one language, so you should be proud of it, and never, never stop speaking because you think that you're gonna say something wrong. People will understand, people are forgiving, so they need to get to know you. That was very, very good for me.

Definitely you need to find a mentor. There's always things we're gonna learn ourselves, but when you have a mentor, that person can help you to grow, can help you to move, to navigate through the industry. It can be your champion. It's mainly finding a champion. In this world, you really have to do that, because it's hard for us just to go and say, I do this, I do this correctly. If you find a champion, and that champion is your mentorship, then it's a win-win, because you're gonna learn more, and that person can speak also for you in situations where you're gonna grow, and they're gonna be very supportive. So always find a good champion and mentor. Those are the things that I've been learning. I found it, and I think that's when my career started to do better things, and be recognized and be heard as well.

One of the biggest challenges is making sure that at the time that piece of equipment is going to be installed, everything is ready to go. We need to make sure that when equipment like an x-ray arrives, there's not going to be complications or delay on the schedule. If there's delay in the schedule, then that's going to impact the opening of that hospital. The hospital is gonna stop making revenue because we didn't coordinate on time, so there's so many things that could impact in the long run the function of that hospital. Another challenge is that we design the space based on the equipment that is currently in the market, but we have projects that span many years. For example, right now I'm working on a project that we started in 2020, and the hospital is going to open in 2030. As you can imagine, technology is going to change, so one of the challenges is to make sure if the owner is going to want the latest and greatest of that piece of equipment, then the space needs to be providing for those accommodations. And of course, another challenge is we manage the budget for the owner. When we are budgeting, we need to make sure that everything that is budgeted is going to be carried through all those years. We need to make sure the escalation is the correct one, the installation, the freight, especially now with the tariffs. We need to take that into consideration. So by the time that the owner is ready to procure the equipment, the budget is there, and there's not a hit to the healthcare system that they're not going to be able to afford.

To me, it's honesty, transparency, and being vulnerable. It's very important to be vulnerable.