Maria Minaya Astola
Maria Minaya Astola was four years old the first time a machine drew blood.
She had been pretending to be one of the workers — the way she always did when the plastic bag factory fell quiet. Her parents, immigrants from the small Andean town of Cajatambo in Peru, had a New Year’s tradition of placing flowers on the machines for prosperity. Maria used those still moments to play employee, running her small hands over the equipment. One afternoon, she wasn’t careful enough. A cut finger. The kind of resilience that doesn’t come from a classroom.
“I grew up with the factory,” she says. “Every year, I grew up with it.”
Her parents came from nothing and built it into something — a three-floor operation in the plastic bag business in Lima’s outskirts. Her father had once been an industrial engineering student himself before dropping out to start the business with his wife. This May, Maria will complete her Master’s in Engineering Management from USC Viterbi‘s Daniel J. Epstein Department, capping a journey that began with a Bachelor’s in Industrial & Systems Engineering she finished in December 2025.
The road from that factory floor to this finish line is anything but straight.
Built from Scratch
Every morning, she crossed to the other side of Lima for school. Her parents made sure she went somewhere better than the suburbs where they lived. The private school offered the International Baccalaureate program — math, physics, modeling, technology, even Mandarin. Her classmates talked about vacations to Europe and Disney. Maria had never left Peru. She listened, went home, helped her father run payroll, and helped her mother file paperwork. In the afternoons, the factory was her reality check — the place that kept her grounded in where she came from.
When she was 16, she graduated — in Peru, 11th grade is the end of the line. She had already been accepted to a Peruvian university. Then COVID happened, and a guidance counselor mentioned U.S. applications. “I was just taking my shot,” she says. She put in the effort — SATs, IB exams, the whole process. When USC Viterbi offered her a spot, the deadline for the Peruvian university had already passed.
Her father didn’t pause. You got in, so you go.
She was 17 years old when she landed in Los Angeles.
Five Years Fighting On
USC Viterbi was enormous and fast and full of people who already seemed to know exactly who they were. Maria was good at English but too shy to speak it, too embarrassed to raise her hand in class, too far behind in the social rhythms to make lasting friends. She pushed through, quietly, stubbornly.
What she hadn’t counted on was her body fighting back. During her freshman year, she was hospitalized for the first time, eventually diagnosed with Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome and gastroparesis. When the thought of transferring crept in, her father didn’t offer comfort. He offered the truth: “Come home, and you work for me. If you want to study, you pay for it yourself, from the ground up.” She stayed. She never asked for accommodations.
There were semesters she vomited every day, losing so much weight she was classified as dangerously underweight. Panic attacks, psychiatric medications, a two-week hospitalization with surgery at the middle of the spring 2026 semester. Professors suggested a leave of absence. She finished. She never stopped.
“My biggest achievement,” she says, “is all the pain I went through — all the vomiting, all the crying, all the painful nights — and I still did it. When I saw my diploma, every single thing was worth it.”
During the summers, she brought USC back to Lima with her. The skills she was building at Viterbi — systems thinking, process optimization, AutoCAD — went straight to work in her family’s expanding operation: mapping layouts, reorganizing warehouses, restructuring manufacturing floors. Her family launched new companies in lockstep with her milestones: one when she started at USC, another when she finished her undergraduate degree. The girl who grew up playing factory worker had become the engineer who could actually help design the factory.
Industrial & Systems Engineering was, in part, her father’s unfulfilled dream. But Maria is quick to set the record straight. “I always wanted to be an engineer, to be honest,” she says. What USC gave her went far beyond the degree. The shy girl who once couldn’t raise her hand learned to speak up, advocate for herself, and fight for what she knew was right. She found her passion in statistics, accounting, and financial modeling — the language of numbers that underpins everything her family built without ever formally learning it. Through USC Viterbi’s progressive degree program, she is now finishing her Master’s in Engineering Management, transitioning “piece by piece” toward the business world she always loved.
Next Stop, Barcelona
After graduation, she is moving to Barcelona to pursue a double master’s in Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Finance at ESADE Business School. Three degrees across two continents. Her long-term vision is an engineering consulting firm, and, true to the girl who played employee in her parents’ factory, maybe a coffee shop alongside it.
“El tiempo pone todo en su lugar,” she says: a Spanish expression her father passed down. Time puts everything in its place. “If you are struggling now, time is going to put you in a good place. You just have to deal with this.”
This May’s graduation is the moment she has been waiting for, earned by the same girl who cut her finger on a factory machine at four years old, got back up, and never stopped moving forward.
Published on May 5th, 2026
Last updated on May 5th, 2026