Mariana Solano '27

Mariana is a first-year MBA student at Columbia Business School with five years of private equity experience at Patria Investments, Latin America's leading upper middle market platform. At Patria, she worked across the full deal cycle in healthcare and food & beverage, supporting transactions across Colombia, Chile, and Mexico, from origination and investment committee preparation through fundraising and LP materials. Through the PE Field Study at Columbia, she is currently working with Aquitaine Capital, a lower middle market firm in New York, on deals across healthcare and education, and is seeking an investing role in private equity post-graduation.

Connect with Mariana Solano on LinkedIn.

I have approached CBS deliberately as a platform to extend the expertise I built at Patria and build new relationships beyond Latin America. On the knowledge side, I enrolled in PE Finance and Advanced PE to formalize my understanding of buyout mechanics and valuation frameworks that I had applied in practice but not yet studied systematically. On the experiential side, taking the PE Field study class has been the most direct way to learn and experience PE in the US first hand. I have also attended the weekly PE Breakfasts consistently, gaining exposure to practitioners across fund strategies and geographies.