Second year Evening & Weekend MBA student Michele Obermeyer, MBA 26, never intended on going to business school. A math major and a German minor, she originally had her heart set on becoming a math professor. However, by the time she was job-searching after graduation, a sluggish economy led to her securing a job as a software engineer.
While she enjoyed her position, Michele was also an extrovert who craved more people-focused time in her work life. The COVID years confirmed that desire, and that’s when she began managing the engineering team at her previous company.
Not only did Michele enjoy working with people in this new role, she also discovered she really liked working in personal development. But there was a small problem—she didn’t have any sort of business background. She remembers, “I’d be in meetings with salespeople and didn’t know how to think about things or even understand what their acronyms meant. So that’s when I decided I wanted to do my MBA.”
After deciding to pursue her degree, she says applying to Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley was an easy decision. Several family members attended the school, and she’s from the East Bay Area. She was also drawn to the Flex Program option. Between personal needs with an autoimmune illness and traveling a lot for work, she needed a rigorous program with lots of flexibility.
Michele says her expectations for the program were that she was going to “just take some classes and that’s it.” At all the admissions events, everyone kept talking about the transformative nature of the MBA program. She admits she was skeptical of these claims, figuring it was more a sales tactic for an admission event than a genuine claim.
But then she entered the program.
She quickly found that these were not just wild claims but a very real reality. “Everyone in the Flex Program is doing so many wildly different things that you can’t help but think you can also do a whole lot of anything,” she says.
She found herself inspired by classmates taking big risks, like starting their own companies, and this inspiration kindled a new kind of fire in her as well. She started thinking about what risks she wanted to take—what opportunities she wanted to seize.
In addition to being inspired by her classmates, Michele says the classes themselves gave her the confidence to start asking these questions as well. While it was a given that the professors were going to be brilliant and engage the students in evidence-based learning, she found that her classes were also immediately applicable to her job.
Michele specifically cites her Leading People class, taught by Juliana Schroeder, as being consistently applicable in her role. The class spent a lot of time discussing general best practices for leading a team. She says it was incredibly rewarding to “be able to sit in a class and immediately turn around and put it into effect.”
For example, during one session, the class discussed best practices for hiring. The discussion centered around how to ask unbiased, consistent, and uniform questions for each candidate. At the time, her company was hiring for various positions, and she was able to transform part of the hiring process to incorporate standardized questions and other class learnings.
With growing confidence from classes and being surrounded by inspiring classmates, Michele decided it was time for her to take a leap of her own.
While she has nothing bad to say about her previous company or role as a Director of Software, she felt like she’d done all she could do in that position. “I wanted to go to a smaller startup where I could grow the team, be more involved with fundraising, and be more involved in the process of building the company. I wanted to make a bigger impact.”
So she secured her current role as the Director of Engineering at a Pre-Series A company with a small team. While acknowledging that this was a riskier move than staying at her last job, she is thrilled by the opportunity to put new processes in place and help build things from the ground-up. She’s already been instrumental in implementing more thorough development practices, leading the team in goal-setting, and making sure staff feel motivated and empowered.
While her classes and the general environment of the program were two drivers in this move, there is still one more vital piece of the puzzle that helped her take this risk: her much beloved study group—Lux 513.
In fact, Michele largely credits this group for her success in transitioning to her new role. “I would not have been able to keep my head above water without their help.” The close-knit group of 6 clicked well from the start and work really well together. The group meets at least once or twice a week on Zoom and even took a trip to Seattle together to go to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery after studying the company.
Michele says her job change occurred during the same time as some complicated classes. Her study group faithfully helped her stay afloat by helping her catch up and sharing their work on a homework set. She says she has been able to return the favor for them as well when they go through their own big life changes.
As a self-described super extrovert, finding these kinds of connections has been hugely transformational for Michele. In addition to her study group and connecting with students in classes and in different shared chat channels, Michele also serves as a Social Cohort Representative. The position involves planning trips and various social events and getting to know everyone in the cohort. Some of the events she’s helped facilitate include game nights, happy hours, and even a ski trip over winter break with rented Airbnbs.
Between her study group, connections made from being Social Cohort Representative, and even fostering friendships with fellow local students, Michele has found that you will never feel alone in the program. There is always someone to answer your questions, come alongside you, and support (or commiserate with) you. She notes that even people that at first seem really different from each other often turn out to have a lot in common.
Time and again Michele has learned that “the more you put yourself out there—in any respect—the more you get out of it in the end.” She’s seen this play out when she took a risk and switched jobs. She’s seen it in hours of time dedicated to her role as Social Cohort Rep—paying off in amazing experiences and opportunities for influence. She’s also seen it in another role she’s serving in: an incoming Co-President for the EWMBA (Evening and Weekend MBA) Association.
A connection from the WELaunch event, the orientation that kicks off the Evening & Weekend MBA program, helped her find her place in this role. While another time-consuming position, she’s already been able to see exciting outcomes from some of the changes they’ve been working toward. She says, “We already have so many ideas about how to make the experience better for people.” They are working toward more representation for online students, are creating more social events, and working toward making online classes better for everyone,” she says. “The amount of time spent in meetings is minuscule compared to the impact.”
Michele appreciates how Berkeley has given her and her classmates “lots of opportunities to effect large amounts of change in relatively small amounts of time.” She appreciates the amount of trust they have in students. She also observes that having a high level of trust in students serves to illustrate how Berkeley is confident in the quality of their education.
She cites another example of this trust where students are given leeway to participate in transformative experiences. Academic Cohort Representatives conduct mid-course surveys halfway through the course. They survey everyone in the class to gather feedback on how things are going and then present that feedback to the professor. Michele has seen professors be incredibly responsive to this feedback and even completely change the way they were going to administer their final exams.
When students are willing to step out and take a risk, they find it’s often met with a great reward.
While Michele admits that she was a bit skeptical about the lofty “transformational” claims at her admissions event, she’d be the first to admit that she is no longer a skeptic.
The math major who thought she was just going to go in and take a couple of classes so she could understand acronyms during work meetings has now found herself totally immersed in the Berkeley experience. And that immersion—that participation—has really been a key to her experience. Despite her busy schedule, engaging in these diverse opportunities has allowed her to truly maximize her time at Haas.
And through it all, she is loving every single transformational moment.
The Berkeley Haas Flex option offers some unique advantages and allows you to get the same top-ranked MBA without compromising your lifestyle.