From high school dropout to managing partner: The inspiring journey of U of T alum Eugene Choi

Eugene Choi was in high school when his mother contracted SARS and his father was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Amid a challenging time for his family, Choi made the difficult decision to drop out of school and began working various part-time jobs, from flipping burgers to ringing up sales.

While he did what he had to do to support himself and his family, Choi felt he had more potential but wasn't sure how to resume and further his education. Then, one day, his father showed him a newspaper ad for the Academic Bridging Program at the University of Toronto's Woodsworth College. The program offers prospective students who don't meet admission requirements a path to qualifying for degree programs in U of T's Faculty of Arts & Science.

Today, Choi is managing partner of Blue-Mark Management Consultants, a leading Toronto consultancy firm – and he credits the Academic Bridging Program for setting him on the path to higher education and professional success. 

“All the people who managed Woodsworth’s Academic Bridging Program were very pleasant to work with and very caring about everyone who went through the program,” says Choi, who completed the program before going on to earn an honours bachelor of arts with a double major in philosophy and the ethics of law. “They support you through the whole process and they know there's a number of reasons why people need this type of program. They just want you to succeed.”

Choi’s education was derailed after his mother, a nurse at Scarborough Grace Hospital, caught SARS while caring for a patient amid the early days of the SARS outbreak in Toronto in 2003. When his father began to show symptoms, he got tested as well – while the SARS test came back negative, he was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer.

"My mom catching SARS was a blessing in disguise because we were able to find that lung cancer,” says Choi, noting that lung cancer often isn’t detected until it’s too late. “They're both fully recovered now, but as you can imagine that was a pretty difficult time. So, I dropped out of high school and started working at whatever part-time gigs I could get.”

The Academic Bridging Program at Woodsworth enabled Choi to further his studies by bridging the gap between his prior education and the skills required for first-year university courses – allowing him to transition into an undergraduate program.

After graduating, Choi started with his own projects until he eventually secured a role as a business analyst with Travelers Canada.

Over time, however, Choi began to see the need to advance his education further. “I realized – as I started to manage projects and took on more of a strategic role – that I didn't have the financial language to speak with the leaders in the company,” he says.

That realization prompted him to return to U of T, this time to pursue a master of business administration (MBA) at the Rotman School of Management. “[Rotman] is the top program in the country, and it was the one I could most easily do part-time while continuing my career,” he says. “Having the familiarity of home and the ability to keep working as I did was quite beneficial.”

Today, Choi works with medium-to-large sized firms at Blue-Mark, advising them on organizational design and effectiveness, strategy and planning, operating models and complex change implementation.

“We help with organizational effectiveness issues. So, mostly things to do with people in the organization,” says Choi. "We help our clients figure out when the interaction is not working right or why they're not getting the results they're looking for. Is there something around how their teams are working together, or how their people are being trained?”

Choi says his undergraduate education in philosophy has served him well in management consultancy. “Philosophy, in simple terms, is breaking down arguments. That thought process of taking a problem and breaking it down and analyzing its component parts – and then putting it back together again to come up with the new solution – is the basic thought process that you need in every single engagement you have with a client,” says Choi.

“It's basic problem solving and critical thinking types of competencies. I use it every single day with every single problem I come across.”

As Choi has advanced in his own career, he has also made sure to give back and help others. He has served on numerous non-profit boards, including at Kennedy House, which provides youth services in the Toronto area, and Mackenzie Health Volunteer Association. He is currently serving on the board of directors for the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.

“Most of my non-profits have been involved with at-risk youth,” he says. “I understood the feeling of being lost after dropping out of high school, so I wanted to do my best to give back to those who are facing tough situations.”

Choi is also a dedicated mentor at U of T. He volunteered for the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Backpack-to-Briefcase (b2B) program, which connects recent grads with experienced alumni, and is a mentor for the Alumni-Students Mentorship Program at Woodsworth College. He also became a member of the U of T Alumni Association in 2023.

“The aspiration is to get to a point in my career where I can take a step back from the day-to-day running of the business and bring my talents to other causes, so I can have an impact on our world,” he says.