JORGE CARDONA (MBA ’96) Even though Jorge Cardona is a numbers guy, it’s his words that can make the greatest impact. Each year he speaks with high school students at Madison College’s annual Latino Youth College and Career Fair and knows his presence makes a difference. “It’s like letting them open a book to see what the world has to offer them so they can envision it in a Hispanic face,” says Cardona, vice president of finance at the World Council of Credit Unions in Madison, Wisconsin. Cardona’s career was enhanced by the MBA he earned at the WSB as a Consortium for Graduate Study in Management fellow. While he still uses the technical skills he gained from his MBA, he says he values the relationships and collaborations he experienced at WSB most. “I learned from my classmates here, not just the professors,” he says. “That’s why having high-quality classmates is so important.” The MBA helped put Cardona on track to move up in his finance career, most of which was spent at Oscar Mayer and its parent company, Kraft Heinz. Finance was always part of the equation for Cardona, who grew up in Milwaukee. “I was the little kid in junior high who would walk 20 | UW–Madison Wisconsin School of Business
around with a calculator,” he says. “I would read the newspaper because the SALT II treaty negotiations were taking place, and I would take out my calculator and do the math myself.” His first job after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was working in collections and customer service for Toyota Motor Credit Corporation in Deerfield, Illinois. He enjoyed it, but wanted something better and decided to pursue an MBA. He was recruited by Oscar Mayer immediately after earning his Wisconsin MBA in corporate finance and investment banking. Though he moved up the ladder in finance over his 19 years at Kraft Heinz, he still found himself in a unique situation of rarely encountering others who were born and raised in areas with few Hispanics. “When we’d get Hispanics or people who spoke Spanish at Oscar Mayer, they were always from out of town, from another country, or a state with a heavy Hispanic population,” he says. He hopes that changes for future generations, and does his part to ensure that it will. That’s why he tells students about his career, in English and Spanish. “It almost doesn’t matter what you say,” Cardona says. “They see you, they realize anything is possible, and say, ‘We can do that. We can go to college.’”