Ready for her dreams: An international student’s MBAi experience
As a young girl growing up in Medellin, Colombia, Natalia Molina ’25 MBAi had big dreams for herself.
Today, she is standing on the precipice of those dreams, nearing graduation from Northwestern’s MBAi Program, a joint-degree program offered between the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering.
“My city in Colombia was named the most innovative city in the world, but access to technology and higher education is still a privilege,” Molina said. “That reality shapes what kids dream about and their future opportunities. I wanted to become a better professional in technology strategies. It’s something I enjoy, and I believed I could create a meaningful impact through it.”
Molina spent several years working in e-commerce in the Latin America and Caribbean region, where she led online sales and omnichannel data strategies with global retail companies. She was making an impact, but she aspired to do even more.
For that, she turned to MBAi.
The MBAi program is designed for aspiring leaders to excel in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), helping them develop the skills needed to work effectively with C-suite executives, engineers and data scientists in industry-leading organizations.
Molina was drawn to the program because of the program’s esteemed faculty and the cohort of students who would become her classmates.
“The program offers intense classes that explore how emerging technologies can be applied across industries,” she said. “The faculty does an excellent job of bringing together students with both technical and strategic mindsets. I loved learning from classmates with different professional and cultural backgrounds and hearing perspectives different from my own.”
The program’s internship requirement was also a huge plus. Molina served as an intern with Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehouse that allows users to store, analyze and share data from multiple channels.
She said the MBAi program did a great job of preparing her for the internship.
“Through the classes, I gained a deep understanding of the data layers within a company, which helped me understand what a company like Snowflake does,” she said. “It gave me very good foundations to establish conversations with the company, identify challenges, and provide impactful solutions.”
With graduation approaching, Molina is weighing two career options: working for a tech company such as Snowflake that provides cross-industry solutions or driving technological innovation with a retail company.
Whichever path she chooses, Molina will be sure to apply knowledge from MBAi, as well as from her experience as co-president of the Kellogg Tech Club, one of the largest clubs at Kellogg.
She also will turn to lessons learned from her capstone experience, where she partnered with students from Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) program on a client project for global consulting firm Deloitte. For that project, she and her teammates compared AI forecasting models with traditional models to create more accurate solutions for retail companies.
It was an experience that helped Molina combine past experiences with newfound knowledge to create the impact she has dreamt of since she was a kid.