Trinity Data Science Senior Prepared for Big Job in Management Consulting

José Manuel Salazar Bogado ‘26 likes solving puzzles under pressure. Now, he’ll make a career out of it.

After graduating this spring, Salazar will step into a high-pressure, business analyst role at McKinsey & Company, one of the premier management consulting firms in the world. There, he’ll be solving puzzles using skills he’s sharpened as a Trinity undergrad.

“When you start at the firm, you hit the ground sprinting. It's all out from the very first second that you start on a project,” Salazar says. “You have real responsibilities and real accountability from the very first day. When you mess up, you mess up in front of everybody.”

Salazar says he’s not stressed. Trinity University has helped him build his problem-solving skills thanks to faculty with a passion for purposeful mentorship, and projects that connected him with real-world scenarios.

Finding Trinity, for Salazar, was like finding the corner piece of his life’s puzzle. With an international childhood that started in Venezuela, then moved through Beijing, Malaysia, then high school in Mexico City. Choosing Trinity allowed him a chance to keep exploring.

At first, Salazar was set on becoming a marketing major at Trinity's Neidorff School of Business. But he found the Business Analytics and Technology (BAT) major (centered around the world of big data) as a better fit.

“I never considered myself to be a very numbers-oriented person. But what I like about… analytics, is that it’s almost like a puzzle,” Salazar says.  “Just putting the pieces together and trying to figure out what the numbers say, piece by piece, building up until you get the big picture. “

Salazar looks back fondly at two spreadsheet modeling classes, both with Professor James Maxey. “He teaches you like you're the only student in the room. If someone is falling behind or just needs a little extra help, he'll pause the class for 30 seconds, make sure you're caught up to speed, and then we continue,” Salazar says. “But his approach to teaching is all ‘what about these concepts are you actually going to use?’”

And Salazar also notes a data science course that partnered with energy giant Sunoco, where he joined a student team tasked with developing an AI machine learning model that could predict gasoline demand in the United States, then use it to solve the challenge of declining gasoline demand in California. Salazar was excited when he found out that “we were actually presenting to two people from the pricing team at Sunoco,” he says. The project recommended that Sunoco reenter or expand their operation in California, but with hybrid refueling stations that combine traditional gas pumps with electric vehicle fast chargers.

Salazar’s hands-on experience also flourished outside the classroom. He interned twice in Austin, first for Dell Technologies in 2024, then for his “dream spot” at McKinsey & Company in 2025. 

At McKinsey, Salazar noticed his practical classroom approach paying off.

“A lot of what I learned in Maxey’s classes, I was able to use on the very first day at McKinsey, which meant I was further ahead than a lot of my peers in that kind of data analytics crunching numbers aspect,” he says. “That’s huge, especially when you're at a firm that's as intimidating as McKinsey where everyone has a Harvard MBA, being able to be ahead of some other students who went to these really big universities.”

“There's tons of interns from Ivy Leagues all over, and being able to jump ahead of them because of something that I learned at Trinity just showed to me that the ‘Neidorff difference’ is real,” he says.

At McKinsey, Salazar says his eyes are set on rising to the partner level. And he wants to bring his work full-circle, hopefully one day opening a division in his home country of Venezuela.

“I feel an obligation to take my skills, take my experience, and to contribute in a way that is meaningful to the economy,” Salazar says. “I want to mentor the next generation of CEOs from Venezuela.”