Olga Novoa Cipriani

University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management

“Human-centered leader building trust, empowering others, and creating meaningful impact through learning, connection and compassion.”

Hometown: Born in Lima, Peru; Grew up in Central Texas.

Fun fact about yourself: I process my life through art. Whether it’s music, dancing, or painting, I use creativity to move through life’s ups-and-downs, process my emotions, connect with different cultures, and uplift the communities around me. It helps me create space to connect with myself, find inner peace, and remember I’m part of something much greater than myself.

Undergraduate School and Degree: University of California, Davis, Bachelor of Arts in Psychology; minors in Education and Chicanx Studies.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? The Association of Behavior Consultants as a Developmental Program Manager & Registered Behavior Technician.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Salesforce in San Francisco, CA, as a Human Resources Business Partner Graduate Intern

Where will you be working after graduation? Salesforce as an Employee Success Business Partner Lead

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• International House World Tour Project Winner & Co-Lead (January-April 2026)
• UC Davis MBA Ambassador (Winter & Spring 2026)
• United Nations Association – Davis Chapter (December 2025)
• MBA Integrated Management Project (IMP) – Capstone (Fall 2025)
• Salesforce Dreamforce- Sponsored Attendee (October 2025)
• UC Davis ASM Cultural Leadership & Inclusion Event Contributor- Diwali (Fall 2025)
• Korean Society Entrepreneurship & Innovation Competition Participant (April 2025)
• Chicanx/Latinx Leadership Summit – Graduate Representative (2024–2025)

Awards & Honors

• Hispanic Scholarship Fund Scholar & Ambassador (2025-2026)

National award for academic achievement and leadership. 

• Chicana Latina Foundation Scholar & Ambassador (2024-2026)

Fellowship award for Latinx community leadership and service.

• UC Davis Ideas Competition Winner (Dec. 2024)

Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

• UC Davis Alumni Scholarship (Aug. 2024)

Graduate School of Management award for excellence and leadership.  

• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certificate (July 2025)

Organization workflow efficiency

• Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s UC Entrepreneurship Academy – Foundations Certificate (March 2025)

Completed program led by Professor Andrew Hargadon; I built skills in innovation strategy, opportunity recognition, and venture execution.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I am most proud of earning an Ideas Competition award and participating in the UC Davis Big Bang! entrepreneurship competition alongside my brother and Ph.D. candidate in history, Miguel Novoa. In our project, Melody Museum, we created a platform for cultural exploration through music that makes global learning accessible, particularly for those with financial or physical limitations. This project matters deeply to me because it transforms personal hardship into opportunity, honoring our mother’s love of learning while expanding access for others.

The idea emerged during a difficult period in our lives. While our mother was bedridden with advanced breast cancer, we curated music and videos so she could virtually explore places she had always dreamed of visiting but could never afford. Those moments showed us that cultural discovery does not depend on money or mobility; connection is still possible when curiosity remains. Furthermore, as low-income, first-generation students, global learning often felt out of reach for us as well. Even after earning scholarships to study abroad, COVID cancelled our programs and exposed the fragility of traditional access to global education. We turned to music and language learning, realizing it could become a bridge to the world for others.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I am most proud of helping children find their voice while working as a Developmental Program Manager and Registered Behavior Technician at the Association of Behavioral Consultants. I worked with infants and children with developmental disabilities, many of whom were nonverbal. By conducting developmental assessments, creating individualized strategies, and collaborating with caregivers, external providers, and team members, I helped build supportive educational teams, so each child had the support needed to grow. The most meaningful moments came when a child spoke their first words or expressed a need independently for the first time. Watching caregivers realize their child could communicate was life-changing for them and for me. This achievement shows the power of collaborative, human-centered support leadership. I wasn’t just teaching skills; I was helping families connect, advocate, and access a future that once felt out of reach.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose UC Davis for its emphasis on collaborative leadership, which has thrived under Dean H. Rao Unnava’s cross-disciplinary Industry Immersions. These immersions unite MBA students with fellow graduate students from across the university to tackle real-world challenges in the areas of food and agriculture, biotechnology and sustainable energy.

Through my work in community, healthcare, and educational settings, I learned that meaningful change comes from trust, shared ownership, and diverse perspectives working together. The GSM’s tight-knit, team-based environment reflected the kind of leader I wanted to become: one who builds alignment rather than hierarchy. I wanted a program where collaboration was practiced earnestly through cohort relationships, accessible faculty, and community engagement. For me, business education was never just about technical skills; it was about learning to bring people together to solve complex problems.

With the GSM one of Poets&Quants’ 10 Business Schools To Watch and under the leadership of Dean Unnava (named Poets & Quants’ Dean of the Year in 2024), UC Davis felt like a place where leadership meant partnership, making it the right environment for my growth.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? It has been an honor to learn from Lecturer Candice Reimers during my MBA journey. She transformed how I think about leadership and organizational impact. She challenged me to see people strategy not as an HR function, but as a core driver of business success. What stood out most was her ability to bridge theory and real-world application. Drawing from her experience building people systems at Google and advising organizations across industries, she helped me understand how culture, incentives, performance management, and inclusion are deeply interconnected. Her course reinforced my belief that leadership is not about control or power; it is about collaboratively designing systems where people can thrive. As someone committed to human-centered leadership, she sharpened my ability to think strategically about how to align people, purpose, and performance.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite course was Organizational Strategy with Professor Elizabeth Pontikes. Throughout the class, we explored how organizations create value not only financially, but within the communities they are a part. What stood out to me was not discovering this idea for the first time, but finally seeing it named, discussed and treated as central to business decision-making. The course acknowledged that organizations, employees, and communities continuously shape one another, and that long-term success depends on balancing all three.

The conversations around stakeholder value and corporate responsibility gave language and structure to something I had always felt, but had not seen yet emphasized in business education. I’m pursuing an MBA to gain tools to contribute to meaningful, long-term change. This class showed me that strategy could support that purpose, not only competing in markets but also building healthier organizations and communities together. It became an “aha” moment of belonging. I wasn’t moving away from people-centered work; I was learning how it fits within business and how it can scale.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? My favorite MBA tradition was the Challenge Sonoma Adventure Ropes Course that our cohort experienced as part of orientation at the start of the program. We were asked to solve physical and strategic challenges in small groups. Coming from different professional backgrounds, cultures, and age groups, we learned to collaborate before we fully knew each other. This quickly building trust and camaraderie across our cohort.

One moment stayed with me: stepping onto the zip line and choosing to jump. It required trusting myself and the system. After a long personal journey to regain my physical health and reach the MBA, that moment felt symbolic – not just of the activity, but of everything it took to arrive there. As I moved on the zip line from one side to the other, I realized the end goal matters, but the experience in between matters more. Growth lives in the present moment and in the steps taken along the way to reach the destination. The experience reflected what UC Davis values. The program began not with competition, but with connection, showing that leadership is built through support, psychological safety, and shared growth. Success here is collective, not individual.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? If I could do one thing differently, I would trust myself earlier. At the beginning of the MBA, I often felt insecure about whether I truly belonged in the business world. I sought constant guidance and reassurance, trying to learn the “right” path from others rather than recognizing that my path could look different. Over time, I realized I had already earned my place. I had passed the interviews, been selected for the program, and was trusted by people who saw my abilities even when I doubted them. The learning was not just academic, but internal: confidence grows when you allow yourself to believe in your own voice. If I could speak to my earlier self, I would remind her that she was admitted for a reason and that growth comes not from proving your worth, but from trusting it.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? The most impactful case study for me was Cynthia Carroll’s leadership at Anglo American, a global mining giant with over 150,000 employees producing nearly 40% of the world’s platinum. As the first woman and non-South African CEO, she faced repeated fatalities in South Africa’s platinum mines. Months into her tenure, after another death, she shut down the Rustenburg mine temporarily. It was a bold, controversial move in a high fixed-cost industry that directly hurt profits. This decision profoundly impressed me, demonstrating that courageous leadership demands moral clarity: standing by your values despite costs or backlash, and always prioritizing human life and dignity over convenience or gain. It taught me leaders must embrace tough choices to establish integrity from the start.

What resonated most was how Carroll, in post-apartheid South Africa’s hierarchical mining culture rife with racial and linguistic divides, used safety as a springboard for deeper change. She dismantled communication barriers, engaged miners personally, and instilled dignity and accountability throughout the workforce. Analyzing this deepened my understanding that leadership transcends results. It’s fundamentally about responsibility, integrity, and bold systemic reform. This reinforced my commitment to human-centered leadership, showing how centering people in decisions saves lives and creates enduring, ethical organizations. It prompted me to reflect on my own collaborative experiences, affirming that true impact stems from empathy and decisive action amid challenges.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I loved Davis’s small-town, relaxed, almost hippie atmosphere and how welcoming the community felt to people from all cultures. In the spring and summer, the town filled with flowers, and being able to bike everywhere made daily life slower, calmer, and more connected.

What business leader do you admire most? The leader I admire most is Maria Hinojosa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of Futuro Media. Throughout her 30+ year career, she has used storytelling to bring visibility to communities that are often unheard and to help people better understand one another in an increasingly diverse society. I had the opportunity to meet her as a Chicana Latina Foundation scholar during their 2026 annual awards dinner. Hearing her speak about building Futuro Media and being of service to the community made a lasting impact on me. She showed me that a career can evolve into a platform for service, that professional success and community impact can grow together over time. I admire her because she created an organization aligned with her values and used her experience to expand opportunities for others.

My long-term goal is similar: build a career in organizations and people leadership, and eventually support or create initiatives that serve communities through education, health, and access. Her path reminds me that meaningful leadership is not only about achievement, but about using your voice to uplift others.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? My business school integrated AI into the curriculum through courses like Assistant Professor Helen Zeng’s AI Transformation and Strategy course and Visiting Professor Kay Peters’ Fundamentals of Applied AI. Together, they approached AI from both a strategic and practical perspective, from understanding business applications and ethical implications to learning core concepts, prompt design, and how AI systems function in real organizational settings. Using AI throughout these courses showed me that its value is not replacing human thinking but expanding it.

The most important skill was learning how to ask better questions, interpret outputs critically, and recognize when human judgment must lead. I realized AI works best as a collaborator: it accelerates analysis and creativity, but responsibility, context, and accountability remain human. The experience shifted my perspective from seeing AI as automation to seeing it as augmentation, a tool that strengthens decision-making when guided by ethics, intention, and awareness.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire?  It is difficult for me to choose a single classmate because the people I most admire in my cohort are our international students collectively. They left their families and support systems to pursue education in the United States at a time when immigration, belonging, and safety are actively debated and many immigrants experience uncertainty about their place in society. Beyond the usual pressures of an MBA, recruiting, academics, and career decisions, many also navigate immigration concerns, racial bias, and moments of social and political tension that add emotional weight to their experience. Yet they continue to show up with focus, generosity, and determination, contributing meaningfully to our classroom and community.

Having studied abroad myself, I understand how vulnerable it can feel to live and learn far from home. Watching my international peers persist under more complex conditions deepened my respect for their resilience and courage. Their presence reminds me that leadership includes standing beside others and helping create spaces where people not only feel they belong, but know they are welcomed. For that reason, I admire them deeply.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? For me, a professional bucket list is ongoing because learning never truly ends. I see growth as a lifelong process and staying humble about what I know and don’t know is part of becoming a better leader.

First, I want to continue growing within my role at Salesforce, learning from my team and contributing meaningfully as I develop into a strong people and organizational executive leader. My goal is not only to perform well individually, but to grow alongside others and help create a supportive environment where teams thrive.

Second, I hope to eventually help lead or establish a nonprofit organization that serves the wider community, particularly through education, health, or access to opportunity. I want my long-term career to connect professional leadership with service beyond the workplace.

What made Olga such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“While at the Graduate School of Management and UC Davis, Olga has taken on a number of leadership responsibilities, including serving as an MBA Ambassador. She’s participated in numerous programs designed to build bridges and increase understanding, including The Davis Chapter of the United Nations Association and the Chicanx/LatinX Leadership Summit.

In addition to thriving at the GSM both academically and as a student leader, Olga brings a unique perspective from a non-traditional educational path, as both an immigrant and low-income student. Olga also worked full-time while studying and served as a caregiver to her mother. All of these life experiences have shaped who she is today: someone who leads with compassion and the ability to see potential.

She works to build trust among her diverse peers and exemplifies the GSM values of collaboration and inclusion.”

Inger Maher
Sr. Director, Student & Academic Services

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