Giancarlo Solorzano Picasso

Yale School of Management

“Half a film snob with a passion for engineering and technology.”

Hometown: Managua, Nicaragua

Fun Fact About Yourself: I have learned how to prepare elaborate Peruvian dishes from scratch, but I still manage to ruin rice more than 50% of the time.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of Notre Dame, Mechanical Engineering

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: SER San Antonio, Project Engineer

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I would say serving as a liaison between the operations personnel of one of the oldest sugar factories in Central America and Machine Learning and Data Scientists working with us from abroad. Learning to integrate the wisdom of local experts with the statistical and programming acumen of this (relatively) new discipline was made even more rewarding by witnessing the excitement with which they responded to such innovation. Even though it was a small step towards automation, it showed me that there is tremendous potential for innovation in the places you would least expect it.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? The common thread I have noticed so far is that they are extremely grounded. Almost everybody has something they are passionate about, no matter which sector they worked in before, but they still manage to convey their goals and aspirations in a way that comes across as pragmatic and natural.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you?

There were two main reasons why Yale SOM stood out to me: the international representation and the curriculum. Yale has explicitly made it clear in its mission that it seeks to be the most “distinctively global” school in the US. This commitment is evident with the sheer amount of international students who make part of each class. Building a network that can connect you with the resources of hundreds of different countries enables you to take the best that each country has to offer, culturally or otherwise.

The second thing that stood out to me was the MBA curriculum. SOM’s first-year integrated core curriculum definitely dares to be innovative, by taking the classically different disciplines (marketing, finance, etc.) and pooling them together to get us to understand the different “perspectives” that affect a business or public entity. I was particularly fond of getting to know about Yale’s use of the “raw case,” where information is not neatly packaged before making a decision but must be found by scavenging through several articles and databases.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? I’m most excited about joining the Entrepreneurship Club. Even though entrepreneurship is a long-term goal, being able to attend workshops and help other classmates who might want to start sooner is an incredible opportunity, especially with Yale’s recent push to include more entrepreneurial resources.

On another note, I’ve heard extremely good things about the Hockey Club. I plan on joining, perhaps just to fall on the ice for a few meetings.

The Yale School of Management is regarded as a purpose-driven program. What is your mission? How will your MBA at Yale help you fulfill that mission? My mission is to foster engineering development and innovation in Latin America. My particular interest is in alternative energy. Of course, in order for “innovation” to have an impact, it must be sustained. Doing so requires developing a business that is viable both technically and financially. Yale SOM’s MBA is particularly well-suited for these endeavors: its close ties with the School of Forestry allow it to offer classes that are exactly aligned with developing these capital-intensive energy ventures. The option to take classes in other departments, including some on data analytics that I’ve been eyeing, means that I can be exposed to everything I need (or want). Even more importantly, the truth is that there are a lot of classmates who are equally passionate about these and similar endeavors. These are the people that I want to speak to as I work my way up to completing this mission.

What was the most challenging question you were asked during the admissions process? “What does it take to be successful?” I thought that was challenging because in your answer you had to implicitly answer “What is success?” and I’m not exactly Ralph Waldo Emerson in interviews.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? The MBA was something I was planning since I did engineering as an undergraduate. I knew that the technical knowledge I acquired as an undergraduate had to be compounded by strong business acumen, especially when working in emerging markets. After working for a while in an engineering role in Nicaragua, and realizing what I knew (and more importantly, what I did not know, and wasn’t going to learn anytime soon), I decided to apply for the MBA.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Dartmouth Tuck, Chicago Booth, INSEAD, Duke Fuqua, MIT Sloan, Northwestern Kellogg

How did you determine your fit at various schools? I found fit mostly from talking to current students and alumni of the school. I found it useful to reach out to people with whom I had something in common, from people who attended my undergraduate school to those who came from my home country. That’s because they were able to give me their honest opinion on the school’s culture. Relying only on schools’ websites was difficult since they all seemed to advertise with the classic MBA buzzwords (Global/Leadership). It was only by speaking to students that I got a better understanding of what the culture really was like at these different schools.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? I guess one defining moment for me came a few weeks after I started working in an agribusiness in rural Nicaragua. I was being guided around the sugar factory plant by an older colleague and we spent the afternoon discussing the engineering minutiae relevant to the factory’s operation. However, as the afternoon wound down, our conversation (and I don’t know exactly how this happened) drifted into literature and philosophy. Throughout my life, these have been subjects where I have always had a passion. What amazed me was finding that similar spark in an industry that I initially perceived as rough. Without getting too sentimental, it was a moment when I realized the power of human connection.

Where do you see yourself in ten years? While I don’t think my predictive power is that strong, I see myself in 10 years acting to promote investments and source capital for developing engineering-intense (energy/mining/agribusinesses) industries in emerging markets. I also see myself getting involved in strategy for some of these, to make sure that initiatives for technological innovation are always at the forefront of the company’s mission.

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