By Valerie Davis
Simone Ginanneschi MPA 2026 believes talented people have a moral responsibility to give back to their communities.
—
A first-generation college graduate from the Tuscan countryside, Simone Ginanneschi MPA 2026 (concurrent MBA with MIT Sloan School of Management) grew up in a town of 3,000 people with an innate need to do good. After high school, he joined the Italian Army military academy, earning a fully funded college education that prepared him to later serve as an officer.
“I wanted to do something to serve my country, but at the same time, I wanted to do something that allowed me to grow personally and professionally,” Ginanneschi says. “It’s a passion that came from within.”
“I wanted to do something to serve my country, but at the same time, I wanted to do something that allowed me to grow personally and professionally. It’s a passion that came from within.”
After completing his bachelor and master’s degrees in strategic sciences—the Italian equivalent of political science and international relations—at the University of Turin, Ginanneschi served in the Italian Army, operating across different sectors spanning combat arms, logistics, and military intelligence. During his seven-year tenure as an officer, he was deployed to South Lebanon as a United Nations peacekeeper for two seven-month tours of duty, where he led critical operations to enhance the safety of more than 1,000 troops. His responsibilities included leading a team, gathering and analyzing intelligence to improve situational awareness and executive decision-making, and running data analytics for the UN’s executive leadership.
He loved the multicultural environment and problem-solving nature of the work, but especially enjoyed the opportunity to lead and support those around him.
“When I began, they just told me, ‘These are your people—lead them.’ So, I did,” Ginanneschi says. “I made a lot of mistakes, but leadership was a skill I learned by making tough decisions on the job and taking responsibility for those decisions.”
Even as he progressed toward a likely future as a senior officer, Ginanneschi realized he wanted to serve in a different way with a new set of skills.
He wanted to learn what he didn’t know.
“My whole career had been very predetermined, where there were very little questions about the future,” he says. “I was fortunate to be able to switch to different roles in the military, but I knew that at a certain point I wouldn’t be able to grow as much as I wanted.”
Drawing on the same commitment to public service that led him to the military, he applied to the Master in Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School and to MIT Sloan, driven by a genuine interest in finance and the belief that combining disciplines could amplify his real-world impact. After being accepted to the concurrent degree program, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, ready to challenge himself and expand his toolkit.
Ginanneschi started classes in fall 2023 and was struck by the academic rigor at HKS. He loved how most courses connected difficult quantitative material to real-world policy outcomes.
“The quality of education is sky high,” he reflects.
He particularly enjoyed learning from Pınar Doğan, whose dedication to her course material, openness to discussing her work, and responsiveness—in person and over email—stood out.
“In Italy, distance from power is much higher,” Ginanneschi says. “When I asked for help on my thesis, my professor would reply once every two weeks maybe. Here, I noticed when I needed something, I would send an email and she would reply immediately. It's not something I have found elsewhere.”
His career goals were further shaped by IGA-250: Emerging Tech: Security, Strategy, and Risk taught by Eric Rosenbach. Ginanneschi found Rosenbach’s “cold-calling” approach in the classroom energizing—it pushed him to prepare deeply and become an expert on the topics.
In the classroom, Ginanneschi also found a community that matched his values. He respected his classmates’ mission-driven mindsets and intellectual depth, and he noticed that they genuinely cared about working for the greater good—not just for personal advancement.
“The passion everybody has to have an impact on the world and solve tough problems is contagious,” he says. “You can easily have a conversation about the ‘hard stuff’ because they’re genuinely interested.”
After completing the MPP core curriculum in his first year, Ginanneschi decided to switch to the Master in Public Administration Program for more flexibility, making it easier to balance his coursework at MIT Sloan.
Taking classes at both institutions, he quickly found ways to blend both curriculums and combine policy and business concepts. His HKS courses deepened his understanding of the underlying mechanics behind policy problems, while MIT Sloan emphasized teamwork and rapid, practical implementation.
One semester, Ginanneschi took courses on Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics at both HKS and MIT. HKS provided a strong theoretical foundation of concepts; MIT Sloan gave him intensive practical exercises that allowed him to work and experiment with models. Together, the courses helped him to think critically about real-world issues from different angles.
“The fact that I can think about a problem from a policy perspective and a business perspective and merge the two—it leads to a more complete overview and better insights than just focusing on one aspect or the other,” he says.
Ginanneschi spent his summers putting his dual HKS-MIT Sloan training into practice.
In summer 2024, he interned at the Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investment Affairs in Jakarta, Indonesia, working on projects related to the country's decarbonization and fair energy transition.
And this past summer, Ginanneschi served as a Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow in Bologna, Italy, where he helped design a public-private partnership to renovate the city's public housing. Drawing on his HKS training in policy design and implementation, he focused on equity issues while also overcoming financial constraints to meet policy goals. By using an “optimizer” tool, he identified which properties could generate the greatest revenue at the lowest cost, helping Bologna develop a sustainable, long-term strategy to address its housing crisis.
“Bringing in the tools I learned at HKS and MIT meant I could create a system that can be financially self-sustaining in the future,” Ginanneschi says. “It will generate more value for the city in the long run.”
Carrying forward the inspiration from his summer fellowship, Ginanneschi feels ready for what comes next and hopes to continue weaving business and policy in his career. Faced with two job opportunities—one in the private sector, one in the public sector—he is guided by his conviction that education is not a ticket to personal wealth, but a debt owed to society.
"The more skilled you are, the more you have a responsibility to give back,” Ginanneschi says. “I will take that with me wherever I go.”
The same instinct that pushed him from his hometown, to the military, to Cambridge, shapes his next move—his new skills belong as much to the world as they do to him. It’s a matter of where they can do the most good.
Banner and portrait images by Steph Stevens. Personal photos courtesy of Simone Ginanneschi.
