Every student’s path to Harvard Kennedy School is unique, and what our alumni go on to do after graduating is equally varied.
We asked several HKS alums to tell us about their experiences before, during, and after HKS, and to reflect on how their time at HKS has shaped their careers and lives.
Prior to HKS, Montserrat Trujillo MPA/ID 2021 could measure problems with precision, yet she felt she lacked the frameworks to shape solutions at a systematic level. She came to HKS eager to learn more about these concepts and discovered even more than she imagined.
Here’s what she shared.
“Studying alongside people from every region of the world fundamentally changed how I view problems. HKS gave me a global lens that I cannot unsee, and that shapes every question I ask in my work today.”
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2026Begins current role as chief of staff to the Senior Vice President of International Commercial Banking at Scotiabank
Montserrat’s work involves regulatory complexity and client impact, and the language of finance and development.
“Every role I have been in, in its own way, is about the same thing: understanding who is left out of the system and building something better. The tools have changed. The scale has grown. The conviction has remained constant.”
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2025Works as deputy director of strategy at Scotiabank
Montserrat brought her knowledge about development economic frameworks from the MPA/ID Program to this role. She was able to think about why some institutions work and others don't, why capital flows where it does, and what it takes to change those patterns.
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2025
Montserrat led the business work around the launch of credit products for SMEs: the small and medium-sized enterprises that form the backbone of Mexico's economy but are systematically underserved by traditional banking. What she found in this work changed the way she sees financial inclusion.
“At Clip I learned something I hadn't fully understood before: that the most important financial product feature is whether the person on the other side of the table feels seen. For someone who has been turned away their whole life, being treated as a capable adult with a real business is itself transformative. That's not just good ethics—it's good product design.”
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2021Begins first job post-graduation as a senior analyst at Mexican Central Bank
Montserrat brought the expanded perspective she had developed at HKS to bear questions of real institutional consequence. Her three years in this role were a deliberate investment: deepening her expertise, sharpening her understanding of how monetary and financial policy moves through an economy, and anchoring her academic formation in the hard reality of institutional constraints and political economy.
“I went back to Mexico knowing I would eventually leave for something different, but I wanted to leave having contributed something meaningful, and having fully inhabited the role I was in. That sense of purpose in the present, rather than constant orientation toward the next opportunity, became a defining feature of how I approach my career.”
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2021Graduates from HKS
“It was at HKS that I began to see a new kind of role for myself: not only as a policy analyst operating inside government, but as someone who could bring an economist’s rigor into the institutions—banks, fintechs, private sector actors—that shape financial access at scale.”
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2019Begins the MPA/ID Program
When Montserrat arrived at HKS, she brought a combination of strong technical skills and years of real experience watching policy succeed and fail in practice. She knew what the models looked like from the inside of the government. She wanted to understand why the gap between good analysis and good outcomes so often persisted. The MPA/ID Program gave her both the framework and the provocation she was looking for.
“HKS gave me permission to think bigger about where I could have an impact. The MPA/ID curriculum helped me see that the boundaries between public policy and private finance are far more porous than I had assumed—and that the most interesting work often happens right at that boundary.”
DEV-101: Economic Development: Theory and Evidence pushed her to think about growth, institutions, and distribution at a structural level; DEV-210: Public Finance in Theory and Practice gave her a clearer lens for understanding how states raise, allocate, and lose resources; and API-209: Advanced Quantitative Methods: Description and Prediction expanded her skills toolkit. By studying alongside practitioners from over 60 countries, Montserrat began to see the problems she had spent years working on from entirely new angles. Financial inclusion was not just a policy design challenge; it was a question of trust, of infrastructure, of who gets to participate in the formal economy and on what terms.
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2018
“By the time I decided to apply, I had spent several years working across two of Mexico's most important economic institutions — evaluating social programs at CONEVAL and analyzing energy markets at Banco de México. I was good at the technical work, but I kept running into the same wall: I could measure problems with precision, yet I felt I lacked the frameworks to think about how to shape solutions at a systemic level.”
The gap between rigorous analysis and meaningful change felt wider than Montserrat’s toolkit could bridge. She was looking for a space to be challenged, to step outside the Mexican institutional context she knew well, and to genuinely rethink what kind of impact she wanted to have.
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2016Starts a new role as an analyst at Banco de México
Montserrat shifted her work toward energy economics—a sector sitting at the intersection of public finance, industrial policy, and Mexico's long-term development trajectory. She encountered a different kind of complexity: markets, regulation, and geopolitics all tangled together, so she learned to think across systems, not just within them.
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2016Graduates from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) with a bachelor's degree in economics
Montserrat began her academic journey at ITAM — one of Mexico's most technically rigorous economics programs. It was there that she discovered the precision and power of quantitative analysis: econometrics, microeconomic theory, and the discipline of building models that say something true and useful about the world. But from the beginning, the numbers were always in service of a larger question. Mexico is a country of deep inequality, where the distance between a policy's design and its real-world effect can be enormous. Montserrat wanted to understand that distance — and, eventually, close the gap.
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2015Begins working as a poverty analyst at CONEVAL
Montserrat’s early career unfolded at CONEVAL, Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy. There, she worked at the frontier of applied microeconomics, using causal inference and micro- econometric methods to evaluate whether social programs were reaching the people they were designed to serve.
“I spent those years learning to ask the right questions. ‘Does this policy actually work, and for whom?’ Harvard taught me that there was a much bigger question underneath both of them.”
Photos courtesy of Montserrat Trujillo
