In her pre-SOM role as director of enrollment for a charter school network in Los Angeles, Seidy Pacheco ’26 quickly learned the importance of management skills for mission-driven organizations.
“Success in my role was so tied to revenue—if you don’t have a certain number of students enrolled, you don’t have the revenue to operate for the year,” she says. To serve the network effectively, she had to look at it like a business.
Although that job provided a crash course in educational finance, Pacheco realized she needed to develop her skills more systematically to create impact within mission-driven organizations. That understanding led her to Yale SOM, where she is a recipient of the Sproul/Molloy Scholarship.
“For me, the mission of business and society was a huge factor,” she says. “Every student I met during the admissions process was there for a purpose beyond themselves.”
The first in her family to pursue higher education, Pacheco was born in Mexico and moved to California as a young child. At SOM, she got involved with the recently established First-Generation/Low-Income (FLI) Club. Organizing the group’s inaugural FLI Week, she curated several days of events with first-generation alumni and faculty.
“It’s very comforting to hear that we’re not the only ones who have walked this journey, and that we have support along the way,” she says.
Pacheco also participated in the student-run Meng Impact Investment Fund, researching startups related to education and the workforce. Participating in real-life investment decisions has helped her better understand the flow of capital, one of her main goals at SOM. With an MBA, she hopes to help direct funding to communities like the one she grew up in.
This summer, Pacheco interned at Bain & Company in Washington, D.C. Her scholarship, which lowered the financial burden of graduate school, made the prospect of pursuing opportunities in a new city feel much more accessible.
“The scholarship has allowed me to take full advantage of the whole SOM experience,” she says. “It’s something I am genuinely grateful for, and I wish more students had access to.”
Already, Pacheco says, SOM has broadened her thinking. At the charter school network where she previously worked, she was comfortable considering the viewpoints of immediate stakeholders such as parents, children, and teachers. But, she says, “if you had asked me to think about the funder’s perspective or the policymaker’s perspective, I wouldn’t have been able to properly think those things through.”
“Stepping out of that bubble has allowed me to consider many more perspectives,” she says.
