In 2010, Giulia Cerardi came from Italy to Haas seeking a Master in Financial Engineering degree at one of the world's leading programs. After her time at Berkeley, the trajectory of her career was non-stop. She rose through the ranks of BlackRock and now serves as the Head of Product Strategy for BlackRock Index Services (BIS). An embodiment of what it means to be Beyond Yourself, Giulia has grown into an exceptional leader, seeking to promote wellness, culture, and organizational leadership initiatives through her role at BlackRock.
A Dream Chaser and Hill Seeker
“A dream chaser and a hill seeker”—which is something I recently saw on a sign in San Francisco’s Financial District, and resonated with me viscerally. My “dream” is to bridge organizational success with human well-being, and ensure that leaders create environments where every person feels energized, enthusiastic, and holistically well. My “hills” are the academic and professional challenges that allow me to constantly reinvent myself.
My first major hill was moving from Italy to the United States. I am an Italian-American individual who has learned to find joy in transformation. My journey began in Venice, where I studied Economics and Finance at Università Ca' Foscari, eventually leading me to the floor of the Milan stock exchange. I felt a visceral pull toward a larger "hill"—that ambition brought me to the UC Berkeley Haas MFE program in 2010.
Transformation at Haas
If you are considering Haas, know that this is a place where profound transformation is the norm, not the exception. When I started the MFE program in 2010, little did I know that over the course of 12 months my opinions, beliefs, and perspectives would evolve tremendously. The diversity of backgrounds of students, for instance, enabled me to appreciate the incredible variety of the human experience, teaching me that while our stories are very unique, our core values are universal.
From a knowledge point of view, there is true intellectual genius at Berkeley—you can literally bump into Nobel Prize winners anywhere on campus! I also realized that intellect without wholeheartedness can be a tool without a purpose, hence the efforts of Haas students to apply skills to missions that matter.
Finally, Haas gave me my start at BlackRock. I did my internship there during the MFE program, and it represented the beginning of a long journey at the largest asset manager in the world. In other words, what I learnt at Haas enabled me to embark on phenomenal life-changing adventures after graduation, both personal and professional.
A Mindset for Extraordinary Careers
Haas has top credibility in the industry. Which is why companies are interested in the talent that emerges from its graduate programs. What distinguishes Haas is not only its focus on intellectual excellence—it's the belief in the power of critical thinking, paradoxical thinking, and systems thinking.
By attending Haas, I learned that true skills lie in embracing and managing dualities: confidence and humility, rigor and adaptability, discipline and playfulness, long-term and short-term, quantitative and qualitative. Instead of all-or-nothing thinking, I was taught to appreciate the nuances of the complex systems we live in.
Only by constantly zooming in and zooming out of a system problem, do we find ourselves in an optimal position to appreciate its nature and clearly see how we can influence outcomes. This approach to solving organizational problems, when combined with continuous learning, is one that sets people up for extraordinary careers.
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