Andrew Mairena
Why I am dedicated to the Latinx MBA Association
My personal success would simply not have happened if it was not for the coaching, guidance, and support of family, friends, faculty, and staff in my life. Whether it was my City College Professor who provided me a stipend to pursue research for the first time or my SHPE familia supporting me while I pursued an engineering degree, I was fortunate to have these individuals in my life. In my own MBA journey, I noticed that the support network was not as strong for Latinx because the MBA seems elusive, discouraging many to even apply. However, the MBA has created amazing opportunities and introduced me to people that I would not have imagined. For those reasons, I wanted to create this group that will help elevate Latinx into the MBA world and create a community so that we can support each other and Pay It Forward.
Professional Bio
A son of Mexican and Nicaraguan immigrant parents, Andrew was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. After attending City College of San Francisco, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an Intel/SRC Research Fellow and co-published in the IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium. After graduating in 2010, Andrew worked as a Manufacturing Engineer at Solyndra and First Solar Advanced Technology, then as an Application Engineering Manager at DCG Systems, traveling to and working in over 10 countries. In 2017, he was accepted as an MBA candidate at MIT Sloan School of Management. Upon graduation, he was the recipient of the MLK Jr. Leadership award for all MIT’s 7,000 graduate students & the Miriam Sherburne Scholar, one of the Sloan MBA Achievement Awards for his MBA class. Now, he is a Group Product Manager overseeing many ML and Generative AI products at Moveworks, an enterprise copilot that automates work with generative AI trained on the world's most advanced large language models.
Andrew has a B.S. Electrical Engineering Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a former Board Advisor for the Society of Professional Engineers (SHPE) Silicon Valley Professional Chapter, Board Member for the MIT Sloan Affinity Group Alumni Advisory Council, co-lead of the MIT Sloan 5 Bay Area chapter, and co-organized the 2020 MIT AI Conference, sponsored by the MIT Club of Northern California (CNC). He is also an alumni of Management Leadership Tomorrow (MLT) MBA Prep and PD.