Shortly after getting married, Gustavo Zioli and his wife, Lais, decided they could build a better future for their family if Zioli pursued a business degree in the United States. When the couple moved from Brazil to Utah in 2015, Zioli initially wanted to study marketing. However, an experience as a student employee forever changed the trajectory of his career.
Prior to transferring to the BYU Marriott School of Business, Zioli worked as an IT help desk specialist while studying business management at Ensign College in Salt Lake City. His time in this role sparked his passion for technology and business, ultimately leading him to the information systems (IS) program at BYU Marriott, where he is now a second-year MISM student.
“While working at the help desk, I realized I could learn and apply technological concepts to solve business problems,” he explains. “I genuinely enjoyed my responsibilities and, after being mentored by some close friends, changed my original plans to study marketing to instead pursue information systems.”
One of Zioli’s favorite experiences since joining the IS program has been collaborating with his fellow students. “My classmates are genuinely good people,” he says. “The best memories I have so far from my time in the IS program all involve working with other students. Sometimes I even work with the same group that I’ve been part of since the junior core,” he says. "Although we have many difficult assignments, I always have a fun experience if I'm working with a good group of classmates.”
An experience that particularly stands out to Zioli was working on the IS program’s INTEX challenge, a weeklong group project where all the junior core IS students use the concepts they’ve learned during the semester to solve a specific problem provided by the program. “My INTEX team and I invested at least 50 hours of work during a five-day period. Even though the project was difficult, I had so much fun because I was alongside awesome people.” he says.
Zioli further developed the skills he learned in the IS program during his summer 2021 internship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Denver, where he worked as a solutions architect. As part of his role, he was responsible for building cloud infrastructure for companies that had on-the-premises hardware, or physical data centers. “This internship helped me apply and better understand the concepts I learned in my classes at BYU Marriott,” he says.
Since completing his internship at AWS and returning to campus, Zioli now shares his talents and skill set to make a difference in the BYU community. In his current job as a data analyst at BYU Career Services, Zioli uses his technological and analytical skills to help students successfully find careers after graduation.
As a data analyst, Zioli collects and cleans data related to events hosted by BYU Career Services and then creates dashboards to display data that help event organizers make better decisions. “For example, if Career Services hosts a career fair and department officials realize from my dashboard that not many engineering students attended, they focus on how to advertise the fair to more engineering students,” Zioli explains.
Outside of school and work, Zioli enjoys playing soccer, a sport he played growing up in Brazil. He also loves spending time at the park with his wife and two-year-old son. After graduation in April 2022, Zioli plans to move to Seattle with his family to accept a full-time offer from AWS.
The upcoming changes for Zioli and his family have him looking ahead to the possibilities, and he recognizes how the help and support of those closest to him helped him get to this current point in his career path. “My professors repeatedly emphasize that no matter how successful I am in my career, true success in life comes from taking care of my family,” he says. “I am so excited to work at a company like Amazon that truly wants to solve business problems, and I feel especially lucky and grateful to be pursuing my career alongside my family.”
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Writer: Sarah Calvert
