Representation Matters: Embracing Hispanic Heritage Month At Stanford GSB

Julian Atehortua, MBA ’22, HBSA member

Julian Atehortua, MBA ‘22

Why an MBA? Prior to getting my MBA, I was living in Singapore, helping a U.S.-based company do international expansion into Chinese-speaking markets and Southeast Asia. While I was excited about the work that I was doing, learning a ton and loving Singapore, I also knew I wasn’t destined to be in Singapore forever. For one, while the expat culture was incredibly warm and welcoming, it also felt painfully transient – the first two friends I made moved abroad within weeks of our meeting. And two, I really missed hearing Spanish around me and listening to Latin music. At one point, I had enough and went to the “Latin American expat hotspot,” but I did not meet a single Spanish speaker or Latinx individual! I’m sure there are plenty in Singapore but, just my luck, I never found them.

As I came to terms with the fact Singapore would be a temporary stop, I also realized that my favorite part of the job was working on a small, scrappy team which would be harder to do back at headquarters. As much as I loved my job, and would have enjoyed staying a little longer, I wanted to explore what else might be out there. My team was incredibly supportive, and many of the senior leaders I spoke to had gone to top business schools themselves. I was impressed by and thankful for how supportive they were throughout the entire process of whatever my decision would be. 

Throughout these conversations, it was notable to me not only how much the various business schools they attended had shaped their careers, but also their own personal lives. The idea of growing as an employee, manager, leader and person all truly appealed to me, and I realized that while the career benefits of business school were tangible and meaningful, other factors were just as important to me.   

What other schools did you apply to? I applied to the GSB and Harvard Business School.

Why Stanford? It really came down to what I was looking for in business school: holistic growth, both in career and personal life, and Stanford felt like the best combination of the two. 

What does being an Hispanic business student mean to you? It actually took me a long time to truly identify as “Hispanic.” I spent the first four years of my life in Colombia, where my family is from, but then proceeded to live the next 9 years in the U.S. and UK. By the time I moved back to Latin America at the age of 13, I was fully Anglicized, and felt like an outsider. When I first moved to Caracas, I had a pretty tough time with reverse culture shock, typical adolescence/puberty concerns, an illness in my family, and living under the difficult presidency of Hugo Chavez. I hate that this reintroduction really led me to resent being from Latin America. Well that and the fact that all my middle school friends in the U.S. knew about Colombia was that my family had to be drug dealers. 

Over the following several years my connection with Latin America slowly grew. I lived in Panama after Venezuela and found a much easier adjustment. I loved my time there – another expat-friendly locale – and came to college in the U.S. with a newfound appreciation for my background, missing a lot about Panama. Frankly, I’m still coming to terms with what exactly being “Hispanic” means for me, though I’m also now very proud of the background I have. 

Hispanic Heritage Month is one of the pieces I’m also really taking some time to adjust to. We didn’t exactly have this back in Panama, and I didn’t celebrate it when I was a middle schooler living in the U.S. But now being back in the U.S., it’s been really humbling to see the country care about this month in a way I had not yet seen. All this well-deserved recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month has reminded me how fortunate I am to have landed at the GSB, when so many of my family and friends back home could have never dreamed of this opportunity. I hope this recognition helps me to find and help others whose path I cross along the way.

What are your future career goals? Professionally, I love the idea of applying numbers and business concepts to everyday life, particularly in the entertainment space (sports, film, games, and so on!). When I was younger, I was obsessed with sabermetrics, the concept that a game like baseball can be dissected into factors like on-base percentage or catcher framing. My dad used to love this show called Numb3rs in the late 2000s, a crime drama about a professor who solves crimes by using math. While I’m not a big crime drama guy, the concept of the world just being a series of yet-to-be understood numbers was extraordinary. 

I was in the entertainment space before joining the GSB, and want to stay in the space afterwards. Given how much I enjoyed working on international expansion, I am keeping an eye out for cutting edge pieces of the entertainment industry, most recently the metaverse, AR and VR. Given how much traditional sports influenced my childhood, I’m also spending some time getting to better understand the esports scene, a challenging market with exciting potential. 

What don’t your classmates know about you? I can’t really talk about how much I love entertainment and sabermetrics and not mention that I have a forced ranking system of the 243 unique films I’ve watched since 2018. I’m sure it will surprise nobody to hear that the average film I watch on a date ranks 64 spots higher than the average film I watched for my work! The top 3 films I’ve watched over the past three and a half years? Marriage Story, Moana and In the Heights. 

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