SIPA Career Interview: Olivia Arguinzoni MIA ’17

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Olivia Arguinzoni MIA ’17 has worked for more than two years as a senior consultant in the state and local government practice at Guidehouse, a management consulting firm. The following interview, part of a series conducted by Ahmad Jamal Wattoo MPA ’21 via email, has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What prompted you to attend SIPA for the Master of International Affairs (MIA) program?

 

When I was applying to grad school, my plan was to pursue international development work — but I wanted to have the option to branch out into other areas if my interests changed, so I felt the MIA was the best fit. Regarding my choice to join SIPA, there were a good amount of classes and resources focused on Brazil, where I had lived and worked (or worked within some capacity) for the three years prior to SIPA. I wanted to continue engaging with and learning about [Brazil] in grad school.

Which courses that you most enjoyed would you recommend to current SIPA students?

Decision Models! It was unlike any other class I had taken, and I really enjoyed the challenge. Modeling is a valuable hard skill to have working in or with the public sector. 

Did you participate in any extracurricular activities at SIPA?

In my second year at SIPA, I participated in the Dean’s Public Policy Challenge. My team developed a solution that sought to increase helmet usage among motorized scooter riders in India. I had never built anything before and by the end of the year we had the foundation of a business and a hardware prototype, so it was very cool to be a part of that.

What do you recall about your experience in a Capstone workshop at SIPA? What did the project involve?

I worked with a small development agency in the Northeast of Brazil that sought to incentivize young people to stay in the region by providing entrepreneurial programming. We were tasked with evaluating their entrepreneurial training program to help them understand whether the program was having the desired impact. I traveled during spring break to complete the fieldwork, which included driving all over the state of Ceara interviewing and holding focus groups with former participants and working with our teammates who had traveled previously to analyze the results.

In your job search, how much emphasis did hiring managers place on your GPA?

No emphasis was placed on GPA; I didn’t even include it in my resume.

What made you choose to work at Guidehouse? What does your average day of work at Guidehouse look like?

 

Like many SIPA students, I had done a lot of consulting-type work during my two years at SIPA — during my Capstone and in mock consulting projects in classes. I really enjoyed that experience and was also attracted to the short-term project work that would enable me to constantly be switching things up in my career. I wanted to work specifically with the state and local government group at Guidehouse because it was a smaller, tight-knit practice working on important issues for clients in New York City and State, and, as a native New Yorker I felt close to those issues.

My typical day involves a check-in with my project team where we discuss the work for the day, priorities, and progress made from the previous day. We may also have a status meeting with our main client — to update them on work done since the last status meeting, detail the work to be done in the coming days, and flag any issues we may be having. There is probably an interview with someone at the client organization (as consultants, our job is to learn about an organization, and the way we do that is by talking to people across the organization so that they can give us insights regarding the subject matter the project focused on), so I may lead the interview or listen in to build my understanding of the issue and organization. The rest of the day will be spent working on the deliverables we are developing for the client. This usually involves analyzing data, documentation, and what we have learned in interviews and packaging that (usually in Powerpoint or Excel) to present to the client.

Do you have any parting advice for Columbia SIPA students who are currently looking for internships and full-time positions?

Network horizontally. In my experience, your peers can do way more for you than someone high up in an organization that you have never met.