Mother and Daughter to Graduate from Yale

Yale’s 2010 Commencement will be a family affair for North Carolina natives Dr. Catherine Everett and her daughter Charlotte Goins.

Catherine will graduate from the Yale School of Management’s MBA for Executives: Leadership in Healthcare program, an MBA program for professionals in the healthcare industry. Charlotte, a senior in Davenport College, will graduate from Yale with a degree in American Studies.

“I found out about the MBA for Executives program because Charlotte was here,” says Catherine. “I was going through the Yale website and I saw it. I didn’t come here because she was here, but it certainly was nice.” In addition to getting to know New Haven with Charlotte, being on campus allowed Catherine to attend her daughter’s field hockey games. Charlotte is the goalkeeper for the women’s varsity team.

About first learning that she would be sharing campus with her mom for two years, Charlotte says, “I was excited. She started talking about getting her MBA when I was in high school.”

“I’ve wanted to do it for a while, but I wanted to make sure my kids were out of high school because I didn’t want to miss any of that, so I put it off for a bit,” adds Catherine, who has five adult children – Charlotte, Eason, Jesse, Zach, and Winslow – with her husband Joe Goins.

For the last two years, Catherine has flown from the family’s hometown of New Bern, NC to New Haven to attend classes in the MBA for Executives program, which are held every other weekend to fit professionals’ schedules, while continuing to work. She is a radiologist and managing partner of Coastal Radiology Associates, a private practice that employs 15 radiologists and services four hospitals in North Carolina. Her goal in pursuing an MBA degree was to keep pace with the changing face of medicine.

“Medicine has changed tremendously since I’ve been in practice,” says Catherine. “It used to be that you go practice medicine, you get your money, and you go home. Now it’s really a business and a lot of the decisions you make have to be in a business framework. This experience has helped me already. We’ve done several things in the practice in the last six to eight months that we never would have gotten to if I hadn’t come here.”

Catherine will continue in her practice after graduation, and is also interested in putting her training in medicine and management to work in the national arena of radiology with the American College of Radiology. “This credential will help me with what I want to do. I’m interested in the operations side of radiology. There’s a lot of work going toward structured reporting. A few years ago they adopted a system and nomenclature for radiology and mammography so radiologists, surgeons, and pathologists around the world all talk the same language when they’re talking about mammograms. There’s work toward expanding that to other areas and I’m interested in that.”

In addition to athletics, Charlotte has pursued an artistic path at Yale. “I was an American Studies major, but I molded it into an American film major. I’ve taken screenwriting for the last year-and-a-half and my senior thesis was a screenplay.” The screenplay doesn’t have a set genre, but Charlotte explains, “It’s southern. There’s magical realism. It reconciles in the big city. It’s kind of like me.”

After graduation, Charlotte plans to pursue her ambition of screenwriting. “I really like television writing and the idea of writing as a group. It’s the most efficient and brings out the best in everyone with people feeding off of each other. I’m mostly interested in comedy writing.”

Both mother and daughter cite the friendships they’ve made as a one of the high points of their time at Yale. “I just loved expanding my friend group, like my mom did,” says Charlotte. “And seeing how smart my mom is, which we always knew. She got to go to an Ivy, which she couldn’t before because she wasn’t allowed.”

Catherine explains, “When I graduated from high school in 1968, I couldn’t go to Yale. They started accepting women the year after I graduated. It was either Duke or Stanford at the time. It was fun to be able to do this.”

Yale’s 2010 Commencement will take place on Monday, May 24.