GRIP, Internships Abroad Interviewing My Argentinian Supervisor

GRIP: Social Impact in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Danny Boyko, a GRIP Global Career Guide interviews his supervisor at Mind & Process. 

Meet Santiago Barrio Miramon, An Argentinian Student, Consultant, and Entrepreneur

Over the course of the past two months, I have been interning as a consultant at Mind & Process, a small firm located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My work advisor is Santiago “Santi” Barrio Miramon, a 23-year-old originally from the city. He studies industrial engineering at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), in addition to his work as a consultant for Mind & Process and the co-founder of Inti Solar, an emerging non-profit working to provide solar-powered technology for rural South Americans.

Alright. My first question. How about we first talk about your life as a college student? What made you interested in industrial engineering?

Okay, that's a great question. So when I was younger, I didn't know what to study, I was unsure of which career path to take. I was having trouble choosing between law school, maybe psychology, those kinds of things… of course, economics, business administration, and industrial engineering were always there. But I was so afraid of difficult math, you know, so I didn't want to study anything with too much calculus or science. So I started my college path in Business Administration. After a year, I decided that it was too easy.

Really? Is that a common mindset?

No, it's not. But my desire to switch studies all started when I went to this one business conference, where I got to talk to some of the speakers because I was having lunch there. They were all studying economics. But they were also engineers.

And I was like, well, that's interesting, because their knowledge is super broad. I asked them for advice. They were like, You should study engineering, because that technical knowledge, it's gonna take you far in comparison to other choices, and then you can still have the freedom to do a master's degree in business, or economics, or whatever.

So I took that advice. I switched to industrial engineering, and it's been that way ever since.

What are your favorite and least favorite parts of the major?

My favorite part is all the project management. Like determining if a project is economically viable or not. For example, let's say you want to build a building. In university, they have explained to us how to figure it out, to know when's the best time to do the payments, to cover the costs. So they teach us not only economics, but also the financials. And that has given me a whole new understanding of how the financial world works. And we have a lot of related economic situations, we have administration, those kinds of things, and that's what I like the most.

Now, what I don't like much are the hard sciences, like intense physics and calculus. We have so much of that. And it's so complex. We have several calculus classes, 1, 2, and 3. And you need that foundation to understand the more complex classes like thermodynamics and mechanics. You need to understand the math first. And while it's necessary, it incorporates less of the subjects and real-world applicability that interest me.

Given your engineering background, how did you arrive as a consultant at Mind & Process?

Okay, so I arrived at the practice through school and a college friend. We were at a meeting and he said, Hey, I have this friend who's looking for an engineering student to start at a company as a consultant. At the time, I was actually looking to transition into consulting. And it just made perfect sense.

I was trying to get an interview with a big company in the United States, but I didn't get one. So, I figured I would just accept my friend's opportunity and take the experience, no matter if it was a small or big company. It was an experience, and that's what I needed.

The decision has gone super well so far.

Awesome. Can you describe some of the challenges of balancing between a real world job and still being a college student?

There is a main problem, which is energy and time. As you know, we are living beings with limited energy. Meaning if you have a full-time job in the morning and then you go to college, or if you go to college at night, then by the time you're in college, right, you're completely exhausted. You cannot think, you cannot properly pay attention to the class.

The only thing you want to do is go home and, you know, just go to sleep, because you're so tired. Right?

That there, that's my biggest pain point.

If I had unlimited energy and time, then I would say that's the perfect balance: you should definitely be supporting your studies with real-world application. Sure. Because that's where you really find out how things work. And you can put into practice the things you have been learning.

So I think it's super, super important to have real work experiences. But it will cost you, it will cost you something. It will cost you hours of sleep, it will cost you time with your friends or family. It's not for free: you will have to take that time and energy from other places. You have to be smart, deciding where to allocate your time. You also need to have really efficient time management to be able to cope with everything.

Now to transition, what inspired you to co-found Inti-Solar?

I have to go back to when I started creating my own projects. When I started my path as an entrepreneur. When I was 17, I founded a school company with my high school friends.

We were part of a junior achievements program called The Company, and you had 15 weeks to create a company from scratch. You had to sell the products and take positions in the company. I was selected as the CEO. That was my first experience as an entrepreneur.

Fast forward a bit, and we ended up winning the competition in Argentina. We went to Brazil to compete there and went against the best teams from the United States. It was mind-blowing for me, right? That was when I understood that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. That's what I wanted to do with my life.

After that, I started creating more and more projects. Most of them failed. But I would learn so much from every mistake, that my next try would be better than the last one. I ended up creating a crypto community for Latin American people where they could play free games while earning US dollars. And you know how far that goes in countries with poor economic conditions.

I won an award there. And that gave me a full scholarship to the Watson Institute program in Boulder, Colorado. It was an accelerator for social ventures. And I was a good fit for that program. Because since I was little, I've been a boy scout. I stopped going to the weekly meetings recently, but I'll be a scout forever.

That's where I learned about impact — about being a good neighbor. That experience definitely changed me as a person. And the Watson Institute was my first contact with combining business with social impact. I knew I wanted to create something along those lines.

Through networking, I met Yirui, a student from the University of Virginia. She was exploring the possibility of helping Peruvian communities, which were located far from the cities and didn't have access to energy. She wanted to help them. But she didn't know how.

She was looking for a co-founder who knew about industrial engineering, Latin America, and social impact. I was a natural fit for all three

So we decided to start the non-profit while at the Watson Institute. And we have been working on it for the last year.

Awesome, the backstory is super interesting. What are some of the challenges of creating a nonprofit in an unstable economy?

Well, there is a huge difference between funding a nonprofit in Argentina and the United States. Doing it in Argentina means that you don't have the nonprofit or financial ecosystem you would normally find in the United States. It is not developed at all. You won't get a lot of support from private actors, you will only get support from the government in some specific cases. And even then, you need to ask for it through very, very competitive and limited grants.

We don't have the capacity, the economic capacity, that we would have in a normal country with a normal economic situation. So that means our efforts need to be multiplied.

How does Argentina's constantly fluctuating economy and inflation affect your daily life?

It's crazy. The inflation here, it's non-existent in other countries. We have an 8% inflation rate per month, over 100% inflation rate a year. That means that we never get to understand the value of our money.

We can go to the supermarket today, and buy some cookies for 200 pesos, and we go the next week, or the next month, and we buy at 300 pesos, and we think it's okay.

And it's actually not. The money is changing so fast, and the problems are so wide, that we cannot keep thinking of every single thing.

Everything seems to be breaking apart. And indeed, it has been breaking apart for the last 10 years. And we are not finding an economic floor. That means we live in a complete mess, economically speaking.

Our law system, our justice system, everything's not as it should be, it's not efficient by any means. It's corrupted, which means that the rules of the game — the rules of being an entrepreneur in Argentina — are the hardest rules you can find. Because let’s say you are told that something's gonna happen this year, like you won't have new taxes or whatever. And the next week, you are told, Well, you know what, now you have 20% tax on this new thing. When this happens, it’s impossible to think positively about the future. And you are not able to form plans correctly, right? Because you don't know what's going to happen.

So daily life, it's a super difficult adventure. Every day, things will change. You won't be able to have consistent planning. You won’t.

That's why we are Argentinians: we're really good at improvising, because the rules of the game are constantly, constantly changing.

That’s super powerful. All the improvisation and having to live with never-ending change. Before we go, do you have any questions or topics that you wish I’d asked or brought up?

Well, something that makes sense for me to explain that I really enjoy about my role at Mind & Process is that we do B Corp Consulting for Argentinian companies wanting to become B Corporations. We are a B Corp certified consulting agency ourselves, which is not common. And so I work in both process improvement and in corporate consulting. And I really like being a B Corp consultant because I think it's a good way of changing the world. Impacting the world slowly, bit by bit. I think companies have great power in creating positive change.