Cassandra Salcedo, MBA 21 – A Proud First-Generation Filipina American Making An Impact

Oct 19 2023 • 42 mins

This month on the OneHaas podcast, we’re celebrating Filipino Heritage Month with Cassandra Salcedo, a Product Marketing Senior Lead at Salesforce.

Cassandra is a first-generation Filipina American whose parents emigrated from the Philippines in search of the American dream. It was this story that propelled Cassandra's adventurous career path and ultimately led her to Haas.

She and host Sean Li discuss what it was like growing up in a traditional Filipino household and her trips back to the Philippines, her diverse career path from accounting to commercial banking to social enterprise to tech product marketing, and how she made it her mission to meet and spend time with nearly every single one of her Haas classmates before graduation.

*OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

When she took the first big career transition

“During my social impact fellowship, I had the opportunity to travel to the remote parts that most people in the world have not heard of in Ecuador and Peru and meet people from these regions and hear their stories about what they're using their loans for and how they're using it to propel them forward and got to tell those stories through different blogs, through different interviews that the organization I was working for could do.”

What it was like to visit the Philippines and reconnect with her family heritage

“They built up this whole community… It doesn't exist anymore today, but there's a family gas station that was called the Salcedo gas station. To see so many people in my family that I had never met before not really having a lot of things and enjoying life and just laughing with each other. That's when I think it sparked for me my appreciation for all the sacrifices that my parents had made.”

Why she was drawn to Haas over other business schools

“I remember very vividly at the first Haas info session I went to and there was a slide there that showed the career paths that people at Haas go into post graduation. And of course there was, you know, the traditional paths of banking, tech, but it was actually quite a linear graph across different industries. I felt like a lot of the other schools, it was primarily one, but that graph actually really stood out to me because I wanted a school that did that and I also wanted a school that was small enough to build a community.”

On her initial introduction to the Haas community

“I actually received a hundred percent response rate from all of the Haas alumni that I cold messaged on LinkedIn, which I thought was a telling sign of the community and people actually wanting to give back and share their experiences out of the goodness of their heart and just wanting to help.”