On her first morning in a corporate internship, Francesca Casciari was in a room where colleagues twice her age could move through complex decisions in seconds. She had sought out exactly that kind of room on purpose.
A Teacher Who Taught Her How, Not What
Francesca Casciari was always a straight A student: diligent about her studying, steadfast in her standard of excellence, and curious about the world around her. Growing up in New York City, she thrived in challenging and diverse learning environments, from her classrooms to the wider mix of people and experiences the city put in front of her. She credits one teacher in particular for her instinct to seek out rooms where she still has something to learn: her middle and high school Latin teacher. Casciari spent eight years studying Latin, under a teacher who treated the subject less as a body of facts to memorize than as a discipline to practice. He didn’t hand students the answer to a passage of Ovid and move on, he taught them to dissect each word and each sentence, and understand the sum is greater than its parts.
The clearest example came her senior year, when she chose to spend an entire year on a single independent project: translating a set of Ovid’s letters and building a 40-page argument about how the Latin itself gives voice to women who are usually filtered through someone else’s story in the mainstream myths. She presented the finished argument to a room of faculty members who had spent decades with the same texts and knew exactly where to find the weak spots.
Most schooling trains students to learn what: the answer is X, the formula solves for Y. Casciari’s Latin teacher trained her to learn how, which turned out to be a stickier and more transferable skill. It also meant standing in front of people better equipped than she was to find the hole in her argument. She came to treat that scrutiny as proof the project was working, not as a failure of it.
Landing in a Room Full of People Who Knew More
That habit met its first real test when Casciari began working in a corporate internship, where decisions had to get made in seconds, not days, and the stakes were real. This kind of experience cannot be taught only in the classroom, which was part of why she had chosen to spend her summer pulling 60+ hour work weeks. This was a room that would force her to test her judgment in real time, instead of studying it from a distance.
The instinct she leaned on was the same one from the Latin classroom: find the people who know more, and embrace the challenge to keep learning from them. Somewhere in that first stretch it hardened into a rule she still holds: the day a room stops teaching her something new is the day to go find where more can be learned. What she values most about a demanding environment isn’t proving she belongs in it, but the constant pressure to turn what she learned in a classroom into judgment that holds up under real stakes — the same discipline that first came from standing in front of a faculty panel.
Why the Habit Travels Well
Corporate America has started to notice the same instinct in people whose academic backgrounds extend well beyond finance. In 2024, BlackRock’s chief operating officer, Robert Goldstein, told a Fortune conference audience that the firm has “more and more conviction” it wants analysts who studied history and English, people whose training has “nothing to do with finance or technology.” What he was describing, in effect, was Casciari’s 40-page argument about Ovid: the discipline of sitting with something ambiguous, building an interpretation of it, and defending that interpretation in front of people qualified to take it apart.
Casciari didn’t set out to prove a theory correct. She set out to translate a Latin sentence correctly, then a market thesis, and the mechanics of getting either one right looked the same from the inside: sit with something you don’t fully understand, propose a reading, get told where it’s wrong, and try again. A textbook can’t do that for you. Neither can a spreadsheet. It takes other people, ideally ones who know more than you do, in the room.
The Room She’s Still Chasing
Casciari is ambitious about pursuing a career in the private sector, in high-powered corporate roles where the pace and the stakes are set by the room, not the résumé.
Chasing that discomfort on purpose is a strange habit to build a career around. It’s the same one her Latin teacher gave her years ago, and it has held up. She still keeps in touch with her teacher, long after that first Latin class, which says something about how much the lessons mattered beyond the grades she received. Most people spend a career trying to be the most capable person at the table. Francesca Casciari has built hers around a quieter bet: that the fastest way to get better at anything is to keep seeking tables where she isn’t – and pulling up a chair.
