Biography|Karen S. Lynch — The Night-School MBA on Commonwealth Avenue

Boston University's business school occupies the Rafik B. Hariri Building at 595 Commonwealth Avenue, on the Charles River campus.

When Karen Lynch took her MBA here, the school was still called the School of Management.

It was renamed Questrom in 2015.

The diploma line is settled: Questrom lists her as MBA 1999.

She did not pause a career to sit in day classes.

By the late 1990s she had already spent more than a decade in insurance accounting and operations, first at Ernst and Young in Boston and then inside Cigna.

The MBA was a night-and-weekend correction.

She has described the motive in interviews as a wish to move from the financial statements of a company to the work of running one.

In 2004 Cigna made her president of Cigna Dental, her first full profit-and-loss seat.

A year later the company added Cigna Group Insurance to the same portfolio.

The Questrom credential sits just upstream of those two promotions.

It is not the origin of her career and it is not the peak.

It is the year she paid a university to teach her the language of general management while she was already inside a health insurer.

BU later profiled her in Questrom Magazine and counted her among alumni on Time's 100 list.

The building on Commonwealth Avenue is a large modern block, not a chapel.

Students still come and go under the Questrom name she never saw on the facade while she was enrolled.

The work she wanted the degree for — running a health business rather than only auditing one — started in the next decade, at Magellan and then at Aetna.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons file BU School of Management.JPG, CC BY-SA 3.0