New Student Profile: Luca Di Palo

By
Lydia Fine
– June 16, 2011Posted in: Admissions & Recruiting, Class of 2013, New Posts, Student Profiles

Luca Di Palo

Hometown:  Milan, Italy

Undergrad:  Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy), BS and MS in Management, Economics, and Industrial Engineering

Current City:  Milan, Italy

Current Employment:  I’m a Strategy & Transformation consultant at IBM Global Business Services, the consulting arm of Big Blue.

In the last 4 years I’ve worked within different teams, consistently with different clients (by industry, sophistication or size) and on different subjects (cost reduction, right-sizing organization, business process reengineering, operations improvement, definition of a multi-year transformation plan, etc.).

For example, during the last project for a global EPC company, I worked on the definition of a KPI model to monitor and track the process improvements followed by an extensive business process-reengineering project completed one year ago. My main activities were understand the client’s requirements, design a balanced scorecard comprehensive of all the needed elements, coordinate a team of analysts and transfer the functional requirements to the software guys.

Why he chose Tippie: I was looking for a few criteria: outstanding brand, a top ranked MBA, a small class where I can create strong connections and feel part of a real community, and a solid curriculum in Finance.

Tippie MBA optimally satisfied all these requirements. Besides, during the admission process I had the opportunity to discover and appreciate some unique, distinctive characteristics of Tippie, like the 1-to-1 career service approach, the exceptional ROI, and the class international diversity.

Something unique about Luca: I like to try new experiences outside my comfort zone: in the last years I’ve tried skydiving (you should see my terrified pale face immediately before the drop…), hatha yoga, Cuban salsa, and rafting.

I’m also — of course, because I’m Italian — a quite good soccer player (I regularly play 2 matches per week) and I hope to be able to continue in Iowa City.

At the end of the day I like cooking (“spaghetti with my homemade tomato sauce and basils” is my special plate) and I’m member of Slow Food association, that has the objective of counteracting “…the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

Lydia Fine

About Lydia Fine

Lydia joined Tippie in 2008 as Associate Director of Recruiting and Admissions, where she recruits new students to join Tippie every fall. She oversees digital communications, including email, social media and blogging, and coordinates Tippie’s calendar of recruiting events. Lydia earned her BBA in Marketing (2002) and her MBA in 2010, both from the University of Iowa. She's also venturing into the world of teaching this year, leading a course on Social Media Marketing for undergrad business students. She and her husband Nathan have a daughter, born in 2012, and two rowdy furbabies: Simon, a deranged cat, and a miniature schnauzer named Kitty.