Heather Mychaylo spent more than a decade focused on serving her country and making sure that the Harrier jets she worked on would fly smoothly. On Saturday, the Marine veteran will cross the commencement stage to focus on finance. Mychaylo, 34, says Wingate helped her transition from military life to a career she loves.
“I loved the classes and the professors,” says the Lancaster, S.C., resident and commuter student. “They were all willing to help, all willing to listen.” She is one of 261 grads who will pick up their degrees on Saturday during a 9 a.m. ceremony in Cuddy Arena.
A native of Montana, Mychaylo was attracted to the military when she was in high school, but first fulfilled a promise to her father to give college a try for one year. “It wasn’t for me at the time,” she says.
So off she went with the Marines, signing an open contract, meaning she was willing to do whatever they needed. What followed was training as a jet-engine mechanic and deployments on multiple continents over the next 11 and a half years.
“I traveled all over Europe, Africa, Kuwait, Bahrain,” Mychaylo says.
Although fascinating, the work was also exacting and physically taxing.
“You’re working on a multimillion-dollar aircraft, and you have somebody’s life in your hands,” Mychaylo says. “If you don’t do the maintenance correctly, it could cause a catastrophe.”
Although she knew she could have worked at an airline after her service ended, she wanted a change. Having discovered her penchant for numbers while in the military, when she got back to the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Havelock, N.C., and began to think about college, she set her sights on an accounting degree. But after two years at Wingate, she found finance a better fit.
“It just clicked with me,” says Mychaylo, who will graduate from Wingate’s Porter B. Byrum School of Business with a bachelor of science in finance and a minor in accounting. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s fun for me. You look at data and it tells a story.”
She says Dr. Lisa Schwartz helped her realize that skills such as analyzing data and calculating risks were more her style than the recording and reporting activities of accounting.
She names Schwartz, along with Dr. Barry Cuffe and Dr. Sergio Castello, dean of the School of Business, as her favorite Wingate professors, and says she’s already putting what she learned into practice in her role as a financial-analyst associate at Wells Fargo, where she has interned since June and where she’ll start full-time in February.
“I am using the risk-management skills I learned from Dr. Schwartz and the IF statements that I learned in Dr. Cuffe’s class, and Dean Castello was always there to root me on,” Mychaylo says.
She says it was one of her professors (she’s still unsure which one) who sent her resume and a recommendation to Wells Fargo to help her land the internship. She was one of three out of 30 interns in the summer program to be offered a part-time job in the fall.
In addition to guidance from faculty, Mychaylo found supportive friends at Wingate, some of whom were facing the same struggles she was to reacclimate to civilian life.
“The Student Veteran Organization helped me not feel so isolated,” she says. “It was nice to have other vets around to connect with.”
Mychaylo served as president of the group for a year. She says she would recommend Wingate to other veterans and transfer students. “I had a great experience,” she says. “Everybody has been amazing.”
Learn more about Wingate University at wingate.edu.
