Ray Sawyer ’13 on re-thinking time management: ‘How do I think about where to invest my energy in the places of maximum impact?’

Catalyze

Ray Sawyer ’13 is the director of community health partnerships at Well, a health tech and services company co-founded by Dave Werry ’06.

On this episode of Catalyze, Ray shares about his path from a small, rural North Carolina town to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He touches on his public service project in Uganda as a Morehead-Cain Scholar and the “happy accident” that led him to South Korea on a Fulbright fellowship. The self-designed curriculum he built in South Korea turned the English block into an exploration of dialogue on poetry and pronunciation, sports and segregation, education, and expression. Using these experiences of innovation, he began working at Google and stayed with the company for more than seven years.

Today, he serves as a coach and consultant for Project Be Better, a startup he founded. Ray describes what kinds of problems he coaches college students through, and shares about re-thinking the concept of time management and what it means to live out holistic wellness.

As a member of Morehead-Cain’s Black Alumni Working Group (BAWG) and alumni board, Ray shares his aspirations for proactive relationship building among the scholar and alumni communities. The alumnus spoke with co-hosts Stella Smolowitz ’26 and Allyson Horst ’27 of the Scholar Media Team after a coffee chat event with scholars on October 14.

Music credits

The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

How to listen

On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.

Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at [e-mail].