By Kara Sherrer
After graduating from Universidad de los Andes in his home country of Colombia, Jaime Eduardo Duque began his career working as an operations analyst for a major commercial bank. However, he later realized that his real passion was for the airline industry, and he used his operations background to transition to a South American airlines group headquartered in Chile.
Thinking about his future career, Duque wanted to stay within the airlines industry but learn more about the business side — including strategy and finance — so he began looking at MBA programs. He leveraged his industry background and Vanderbilt MBA to land a full-time position in the MBA Leadership Program at American Airlines Group (where MBA’86 alum Doug Parker is CEO).
“I just enjoy the topics that relate to the airline industry, in terms of passenger experience and…optimizing what we do,” he said. “I’m really happy about learning to make those decisions that make sense for the company (based on the data).”
Click through Duque’s timeline below to find out how he landed the offer.
