TMMBA Alumni Profile: Hannah DeKay
About Hannah:
Hannah DeKay enrolled in Foster’s Technology MBA program with a specific goal. “I went into my admissions interview and said, ‘I want to work for Amazon,’” she says. “They’ve changed the way we view the world and the way we interact with it. And I want to look at how you do that for good instead of evil.” Within two years of that interview, DeKay accepted a job offer for the company.
Today she serves as Senior Operations Manager for Amazon, in which capacity she is focused on increasing the efficiency in the e-commerce giant’s delivery systems. That means cutting down on delivery times and helping Amazon reach its goal of reducing its carbon emissions. “One of the special projects I’ve been working on is an Eco Pack that basically builds a box custom around an item. It’s all recycled material, and it can be recycled again. We’re not having to send things in like plastic bags anymore.”
DeKay’s background is in education, and she later served as a Project Manager for King County. When the pandemic hit, she served as a Director for a COVID19 Isolation and Quarantine site for the city’s homeless population. It was exhausting for rewarding work helping those who need it most. Read more abut her experience here.
“I’m doing something that makes my community and other people’s lives better. That’s always my driver.”
She enrolled at Foster to help her pivot in her career. DeKay was outgrowing her role, and felt she had plateaued in the public sector. She chose Foster as a means of increasing her impact. “Getting an MBA was something I’d always considered,” she says. “I wanted to figure out how do to expand the change that I was able to make in my community…it was springboard to switch industries, and through the program I was able to find a really awesome role with Amazon that allowed me to change my focus.”
As a Pacific Northwest native, Foster’s location and mission of better humanity through business made it an obvious choice for her. And the TMMBA’s accelerated 18-month timeframe was ideally suited for her goals. “I wasn’t getting an MBA just to go back to school,” DeKay says. “I wanted a concise program that would provide me with the necessary skills and enable me to still work at the same time.”
Today, DeKay is able to help the next generation of Amazon leaders succeed as well. In addition to the operations component of her job, she also oversees her team’s learning department and continuous improvement team. “I’m doing something that makes my community and other people’s lives better. That’s always my driver,” she says. “It was a Foster MBA that helped me do that on a macro level. Where I used to work with a 100 people a year, now I’m working with thousands!”
Originally published at https://blog.foster.uw.edu on February 2, 2024.
