Youn Hur

When he went back to school to obtain a business degree, Georgia Tech graduate Youn Hur was determined to keep one foot in the engineering world. “I wanted a balance of a technical and business role in my long-term career,” he explains.

Although he had been out of college a relatively short time when he applied to Goizueta’s Evening MBA, Youn, a project manager for an electrical engineering and construction company at the time, didn’t want to risk quitting his job and attending business school full time. His Evening MBA turned out to be more affordable, since his employer paid half his tuition. He returned the favor by paying dividends to them in real time.

Youn’s concentration in business school was in finance, which he knew little about. “Everything was fresh to me, but the Accounting 101 and Finance 101 classes did such a great job of teaching the fundamentals in a graduate-level course,” he says. In those classes and others, he learned different aspects of business—financial accounting, cost of capital and capital structure, go-to market strategy, negotiation, and organizational management.

Understanding these tenets of business expanded his professional opportunities. He believes his Goizueta MBA sets him apart from other engineers as someone who understands business, and his recent promotion at Amazon Web Services to a supervisory role backs that up.

Amazon Web Services provides cloud services to business and individuals and holds 33 percent of the market. Youn is in charge of AWS’s data center expansion efforts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and a group of employees based in London. With his engineering background, it’s his responsibility to ensure that AWS’s infrastructure needs are met in the growing European market. With his Goizueta MBA, Youn has engineered a career others can only dream of.