Hizbawi Meresa

I am currently pursuing my MBA at Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School, where I have been recognized as a Dean's Scholar — an acknowledgment of academic performance and professional potential. My academic focus is on strategy, finance, and operations, with a particular interest in how these disciplines intersect in practice.

Before the MBA, I co-founded and served as General Manager of a detergent manufacturing company in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In that role, I was responsible for the full operating reality of the business: procurement strategy, production throughput, cost management, commercial relationships, and financial reporting. Managing a manufacturing operation in an emerging market — with its supply chain volatility, infrastructure constraints, and working capital pressures — was a graduate education in applied business before the formal one.

My undergraduate degree is in Mechanical Engineering, which gave me a foundational orientation toward systems thinking, constraint identification, and quantitative rigor. I find that this engineering background shapes how I approach business problems: with precision about cause and effect, and with respect for how systems behave under real-world conditions rather than idealized assumptions.

Through the MBA program, I am building expertise in financial valuation, strategy consulting methodology, and AI-enabled business analysis — and layering these onto the operational and commercial experience I developed as a founder and operator.