FELIPE LEAL

Youth Advocate,
Future of Consulting

Felipe is a knowledge-hungry, competitive high school student in Curitiba, Brazil. His primary goal is to strengthen and use his economic skills to provide opportunities in South America. 

Curiosity and academic engagement are deeply rooted in Felipe's life. Since a very young age, he remembers his commitment to learning what lies ahead. When he was eight, he looked through his older sister's homework folders. He pointed at a symbol: √; the square root. In the following days, Felipe asked his parents about it, learned the following formulas, and played with his calculator for days. Months later, the same process happened with functions, logarithms, and all that STEM educational content creators could cover. Suddenly, as he looked through business consultancy cases, this curiosity took a more practical approach. Incessantly, he asked himself and looked for connections: "How does this business work? What about that one? How does a global event impact such interactions? Why is it they did this approach?" With nail-biting excitement, the financial world took him by storm. Yet, he noticed a pattern: exposure to new, advanced intellectual ecosystems ultimately intrigued him. As a result, he founded the Business & Career Initiative. With the plan of aiding fellow students with opportunities in internships at high-end companies, Felipe moves forward with curiosity.

In high school, Felipe is one of the top-performing students, high-scoring in multiple disciplines in his grade level. He takes the IBDP with great enthusiasm as he tackles challenging subjects. Among his favorite extracurricular activities is debate tournaments, which he always seeks to participate in. Having won multiple awards in South American competitions, Felipe greatly enjoys the thrill of intellectual discussion. Elsewhere, he finds joy with digital tools: especially when programming or editing images and videos. When engaging in the sports world, Felipe found a unique world to explore: fencing. Fencing, sometimes called "the game of living chess," is extremely interesting to him. Dedicating, on average, 12 hours weekly to the sport, he has achieved many medals, from state to national level. In 2021, he was 8th place in the South American Championships. In 2022, he was among the top athletes in his category. When he isn't playing fencing, he likes to teach the sport to underprivileged children in a partnership he achieved with the city hall. Despite such a time investment in the sports world, he still seeks to balance academics and sports.

Felipe strives to attend a world-class university to engage with fellow academically gifted students and to strengthen his knowledge. Witnessing and learning with the greatest minds is of great interest to him. He seeks to shape his leadership and critical-thinking skills and, once out of university, to work at a top consulting firm. Consultancy involves working with different scenarios and finding solutions to often unseen problems. Due to his innate curiosity and search for unconventional knowledge, he regards consultancy as an outstanding opportunity.