Alumni Profile Series: Casi Lumbra

Alumni Profile Series: Casi Lumbra

     As she sips a cup of tea in the magnificent amphitheater at the Chao Center on the campus of Harvard Business School (HBS), Casi Lumbra reflects on the path she has traveled and the journey she is just embarking upon.  A first-year student at HBS, Casi has a plan.  It’s a plan born out of hard work, intellectual curiosity, and a penchant for traveling the world in the company of her friends and colleagues. 
        After spending three years climbing the ladder as a consultant at Bain & Company in San Francisco, Casi is nearly halfway through a two-year hiatus from the job she loves to
re-immerse herself in the world of academia.  She spends her mornings acing cold-calls from the world’s most renowned business professors, afternoons preparing for the next day’s cases, and evenings socializing with the next generation of corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. 
   But for Casi, the business school experience is about much more than what she experiences on campus.  Two weeks ago, Casi trekked with 200 of her classmates to Colombia to dine with President Juan Manuel Santos.  Over the next two months, Casi will spend a fortnight in South Africa working with a growing ed tech company, visit the “world’s most beautiful beach” in Mozambique upon the invitation of a classmate, and make her first trip to Israel alongside dozens of other HBS students.  And she’s got a pretty cool summer internship in the works that can’t yet be broadcasted publicly!
      Long before her days studying mechanical engineering at Stanford or managing her HBS section’s budget as elected treasurer, Casi was a member of the Peak Performance Class of 2009.  She set a high standard for her test preparation by attending nearly every practice exam we offered and rigorously studying vocabulary words in an era when esoteric words were often the bane of a high school student’s existence.  The master of her own schedule, Casi arranged all of her lessons directly with her tutors.  By taking ownership of the process, she set a remarkably high bar for herself.  Not surprisingly, she achieved perfection on the exam.  But Casi’s Peak Performance experience did not end when she attained a 2400.  For the next two years, she worked at Peak as a data analyst, exam proctor, and associate tutor.
     Once Casi takes her final sip of tea, it’s back to study mode.  Energized by the animated conversations and discourse that surround her, she decides to make the amphitheater her “study home” for the next two or three hours.  Anyone who has known Casi since her high school days—which included a stint as an advisory board member for MTV’s ‘A Thin Line’ campaign to help teens stop the spread of digital abuse—knows that Casi is on a journey towards something special.  
​     When asked about the most important factors that allowed her to embark on a career path she loves, Casi doesn’t hesitate to mention Peak Performance and the skills she learned as a student and colleague. “So much of what I need to be successful today, I started learning in high school,” she says. “Quick, logical thinking is helping me navigate the HBS curriculum. Concise, persuasive communication helps make me an effective consultant.”