Describe a personal experience and how it has influenced who you are today.

When I was 15 years old, my philosophy professor, whom I still regard as a mentor, challenged me to volunteer at Instituto de Emergencia Social, to tutor underprivileged children with academic and social issues. It was my first long-term volunteering commitment and, since then, volunteering has become a part of who I am.

In university, while seeking new volunteering opportunities, I found Italy Rapido (IR), a non-profit organization dedicated to academically and socially supporting teenagers with limited resources from secluded regions in Italy. During the weekends and summer months, IR runs projects in selected regions counseling local adolescents to drive them to seek further education after high school. At IR I was mainly involved in the Tepman project and later in launching our first local branch there. We initially approached Tepman with the same methodology we used in so many other secluded regions. But after nearly nine months, we were having very little success and began to find it difficult to maintain volunteer interest.

I firmly believed in our mission and traveled to Tepman alone to converse with the local parish priest and parents. They told me that what works in a big city like Lisbon, doesn’t necessarily work in a village such as Tepman. After extensive brainstorming with IR’s director, I proposed that we establish a local branch to recruit local volunteers. I took a few handpicked volunteers from Lisbon and recruited three other volunteers amongst our Tepman students – all that were left! These students were the source of our inspiration and helped us tailor our approach. We organized an inter-village soccer championship and two funfairs to get the local population involved. With awareness high again, we ramped-up workshops with teachers and tutored several teenagers over the weekend.

The results were amazing. I remember Xico, a teenager who unfortunately had left school. His story would have been one more if it had not been for our intervention. Xico would devour all information on topics he found interesting. I realized it was just a matter of finding the right topic. During a workshop, while building a wind turbine kit I gave him, Xico found a keen interest in electricity and renewable energies. After IR, he went on to a technical training school and finished secondary school with an electrical and renewable energies degree. My work at Tepman reinforced my desire to give back to the community. Furthermore, it showed me the value of perseverance and taught me an important leadership lesson: the need to adapt my ideas to the local culture and people and to never take the local environment for granted – the same recipe has different outcomes in different places. This has proven to be key in working with very distinct stakeholders as a private-equity professional, where in one second I’m sitting with a rural pig farmer and the next the head of credit risk of Italy’s largest bank. I believe this will be invaluable in a multicultural environment such as Columbia and in pursuing an international career.