First, it helps to come from sufficient financial resources that you can pursue a career in ballet, then switch directions, and go to MIT!
From Brazil, she studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, and then worked in dance in Austria, before changing plans and going to MIT to earn a degree in computer science: Meet Luana Lopes Lara: The 29-year-old ballerina spent college summers working for Ray Dalio—now she’s world’s youngest female self-made billionaire | Fortune
Her business: “Kalshi is a platform that allows users to place bets on the outcomes of future events, like elections, interest rate changes and celebrity divorces. The site is legal and regulated in the United States.”
Sounds a bit like NFTs – remember those? From $25 Billion in NFTs to zero!
The story says it was her experience in sports (ballet dancing) that led to this successful outcome. Leaves out that at the root level, it was having the resources to initially purse a career in a field that few people make much money doing.
94% of women executives, it says, had a sport background (e.g. high school and/or college).
Most people don’t have her opportunities – because they lack the financial resources and global experience.
Thus – to be successful, you need the opportunity to pursue sports when young AND to have international experiences (either by being born in a country outside the US, or having the option to study, travel or work abroad).
Those who came (in general) from significant family assets and resources will do better in life – and have options to pursue career paths that often make little financial success. That is the real lesson from the above Fortune article.
It’s the privilege of wealth.
It cements the importance, for those that can, of getting international experience.
Research finds wealth helps a lot
The opportunity to purse sports and extracurricular activities plays a major role in the admission process to colleges. Or did. With the sharp decline in college enrollment now underway, and many colleges mailing acceptance letters to students who have not even applied yet – things are changing as access to higher education becomes less competitive.
The admissions advantage for students from top 1% families arises from three factors.
24% of the admissions advantage is explained by the recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families.
Another 46% is driven by preferential admission for students whose parents attended the same
college (“legacies”).Legacy students from families in the top 1% are five times as likely to be admitted as the average applicant with similar test scores, demographic characteristics, and admissions office ratings.
Children of alumni of a given Ivy-Plus college have no higher chance of being admitted to other Ivy-Plus colleges, indicating that legacy status does not simply proxy for other unobservable credentials that lead to higher admissions rates.
The remaining 31% of the admissions advantage for students from families in the top 1% is explained by their stronger non-academic credentials (e.g., extracurricular activities, leadership traits, etc.).
Children from the top 1% are much more likely to attend private high schools, whose students have much higher non-academic ratings (but no higher academic ratings) than children from public high schools with comparable SAT/ACT scores.
These three factors are unique to the admissions processes of private colleges. At flagship public institutions, admissions rates are uncorrelated with parent income conditional on SAT/ACT scores.