Students

Outstanding Graduating Senior: Laura Gagliano

Outstanding Graduating Senior Laura Gagliano developed a love of technology and has had great academic success, receiving a Presidential scholarship, a W. P. Carey general scholarship and several other scholarships and awards.

2015-04-30

Laura Gagliano’s very first class at the W. P. Carey School of Business changed her mind about her career direction. Much to her surprise she decided to study technology.

The class was CIS 236, taught by Professor Sule Balkan. She explained the ways the technology industry is different than people outside the field think of it — how it requires creativity and ingenuity.

“I changed my major later that day and I’ve never looked back,” said Gagliano, who was originally a finance major.

Fast forward four years: Gagliano has been named the Outstanding Graduating Senior for the Department of Information Systems. She graduates in May with a degree in computer information systems (CIS).

Gagliano was attracted to the fact that technology is everywhere; it can be found at work in most disciplines and can make a big impact.

“Technology is critically engrained in every single function of business and well-designed, well-executed and well-implemented systems can make an extraordinary difference,” Gagliano said, in her nomination statement.

She developed a love of technology and has had great academic success, receiving a Presidential scholarship, a W. P. Carey general scholarship and several other scholarships and awards. She also earned a 3.89 grade point average.

Always something new

“What I really, really love about IT is that it’s constant learning,” she said. “I’m an academic to my core and I love that aspect.”

In his nomination letter, department Chairman Michael Goul said Gagliano is exactly the type of student who should receive the Outstanding Graduating Senior award.

“She is not only an excellent student — Laura is a change agent; one who makes things happen based on what she has learned,” Goul said.

Goul said Gagliano’s list of achievements model what a business school should strive for when preparing students for careers.

“A corporate change agent, an entrepreneur with the skills to make technology work and a level of commitment that means going to the next step — these are Laura Gagliano’s hallmarks,” he said in his letter.

Goul said that before the W. P. Carey School added the Bachelor of Science in Business Data Analytics to its degree offerings, Gagliano already knew that analytics was changing organizations and she went after the knowledge and skills herself. Then she took it to an internship at Chrysler.

Gagliano noticed that the way data was delivered to company executives was dated: there was too much information and it was difficult to read. Gagliano asked if she could create a tool to solve the problem. She got the go ahead and was solely responsible for its development and implementation. She developed a dashboard tool that simplified the data and presented it in a visually interesting, intuitive way. She installed it on Chrysler executives’ iPads.

Gagliano said executives would show up at her desk asking for the tool and would ask her to give training sessions to their departments. “It caught on like wildfire,” she said.

“She impacted the very fabric of corporate thinking and action at Chrysler,” Goul said.

A well-rounded education

Gagliano’s other talents helped her during her internship at Chrysler as well. She completed a minor in Italian and was a member of Club Italiano, winning the Outstanding Italian Student Award her sophomore year. When Chrysler was acquired by Fiat S.p.A., Gagliano sat in on conference calls with Fiat executives in Italy and helped translate.

“Knowing Italian helped me out in business multiple times,” she said.

Gagliano is also receiving a minor in history. She was a member of the ASU Fencing Club, the Supply Chain Management Association and the Department of Information Systems Club (DISC).

Gagliano was a W. P. Carey Peer Programmer, a role that had her living in a residence hall and acting as a mentor to incoming first-year students. “It was incredible to me to see what a significant impact I could have on these students, helping them acclimate to college life, but also leading by example — sharing my academic challenges, successes and opportunities,” she said.

Her involvement in clubs within the W. P. Carey School helped Gagliano land internships and eventually a full-time job. After she graduates in May, Gagliano will head to Houston to work for ExxonMobil in their IT department.

She originally met representatives from the oil and gas company at a W. P. Carey mixer. Those same representatives remembered her the following year and asked to interview her for a job.

“The recruiting process in W. P. Carey is superb,” Gagliano said.

Gagliano, who grew up in Hawaii, planned on attending school on the East Coast; she didn’t think she’d like the desert. After visiting the Tempe campus and learning about the opportunities with W. P. Carey and Barrett, the Honors College, Gagliano stopped her search and applied.

“I just absolutely fell in love with it,” she said of the Tempe campus.

Her job with ExxonMobil will allow her to work on a variety of projects within the company, Gagliano said.

“There’s always something new and something to learn,” Gagliano said of the company’s IT department. “I don’t think I’ll ever get bored.” Gagliano is also interested in game development. For her honors thesis she created and designed a puzzle game called Sheep in Space. She’s working on an adventure game, called Project Wanted, which addresses many of the bugs in the first game.

“Game development is the height of creative development because you have to work with art and music and marketing and design and it comes with a very difficult technical challenge as well,” she said.

Preparing for graduation and the world after school doesn’t leave Gagliano much time for anything else, although she has been trying to pick up running as a hobby. The endurance will come in handy when she’s backpacking around the United Kingdom this summer.

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