Monyk Hernandez Wecker

Ohio State University, Fisher College of Business

“I am someone who has integrity and strives every day to become a better person.”

Hometown: Nuevo Casas Grandes, Mexico

Fun Fact About Yourself: I love to travel. Traveling allows me to experience other cultures first-hand, and learn from them. Traveling outside the U.S. (to Europe and Asia) have enriched my life in ways that cannot be described with words.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of Texas at El Paso, Mechanical Engineering and Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, Electrical Engineering

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Commercial Vehicle Group, Lead Engineer

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Researching, developing and applying a seat sensor specification that covered different industries and having the opportunity to lead the team that developed the sensor that met the specification and its required cost.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? Collaborative. I come from a background in engineering and have always found someone willing to help me with unfamiliar business courses.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? The research that Fisher is currently performing with Ohio State’s Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in the field of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are the next generation of vehicles that will hit our streets, and I want to develop plans to deploy them safely. At Fisher, I will have the opportunity to research the area that I intend to work post-MBA.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? I am looking forward to becoming more involved with Fisher’s Association of Marketing Professionals (AMP) student organization. They have many events throughout the year to help students interested in marketing careers and also help students with resume workshops and interview preparation.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? I want to use my experience in product development to set the strategy for a project and see it to fruition. My product development experience was only in engineering, and to achieve these professional goals I needed to reinforce my experience with the tools and skills that an MBA would provide.

How did you decide if an MBA was worth the investment? Being analytical by nature, I created a forecast that showed how long it would take to move to the job that I was interested in solely through work experience versus pursuing an MBA. The numbers showed that my goal was more easily achievable by pursuing an MBA.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Michigan State and Rutgers.

How did you determine your fit at various schools? An important factor for me was the different pathways that each program provided. Since I am a career switcher, a program that offered the different areas that I was interested in was the main factor when I was deciding where to apply. I researched programs that had strong marketing, data analytics and strategy pathways since these are areas that I am interested in pursuing post-MBA.

Poets & Quants was a website that I regularly used to understand what each program had to offer.  Although, the most impactful experiences were the on-site campus visits. Campus visits gave me a good sense of the culture of each program and how I would fit into it.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? When I was a freshman in college, I realized that I wanted to pursue a career in the automotive industry. Realizing what my dream was helped me create goals to achieve it. It was then that I decided to study a second engineering major.  Pursuing two engineering degrees helped shape my critical and analytical skills and ultimately, shaped who I became after graduation.

What do you plan to do after you graduate?  I plan to continue to work in the automotive industry in a strategic and planning role. Using my engineering experience with the skills that I am learning in Fisher’s MBA program will allow me to develop strategic plans that enhance the future of the automotive industry.

Where do you see yourself in five years? In 5 years, I see myself working at an automotive OEM leading a global product planning and strategy department specifically in the area of autonomous vehicles.