Lianna Lofranco

BY TIFFANY LAO

LIANNA LOFRANCO (5 BS AMF and AB EC - Honors) was born and raised in Tacloban City as the youngest of seven. In a big family, her older siblings, many of whom are building successful careers in different fields, became sources of guidance and support. “All of us went to Philippine Science High School, Leyte, and went to [the University of the Philippines] or Ateneo [for college]. A lot of my siblings were dean’s listers so it sort of became an unspoken requirement,” Lianna jokes.

At the end of her five-year stay in Ateneo, it’s safe to say she has done much more than meet requirements. Aside from graduating magna cum laude and claiming the title of program awardee for the Applied Mathematics with Specialization in Mathematical Finance course, Lianna also has a minor in Finance and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level 1 accreditation in tow.

As is often the case with a difficult act to follow, let alone seven of them, the pressure to perform can be a complex burden to manage. But in Lianna’s case, the only pressure she feels is what she has placed on herself and learned to embrace. The result? She blazed a trail of her own.

Pursuing new experiences

Adjusting to new surroundings has become a common theme in Lianna’s life. After Typhoon Yolanda hit in 2013, Lianna’s family and many of her friends endured the process of rebuilding their community. She later lived away from home to attend high school before moving to Metro Manila for college, where she lived with five of her working siblings. Despite having to cope with so much change, Lianna credits these times for teaching her to be confident in her own path and cultivating her drive for excellence. “Being away from my family was difficult at first, but the experience allowed me to become more independent,” she says. Navigating new territory soon became something she relished as a chance for her talents to thrive, and Ateneo presented plenty of space yet to be explored.

In college, Lianna set her sights on joining the Junior Term Abroad (JTA) program, attracted by the prospect of learning and adapting to a new environment. But months before she left, she already found herself in uncharted waters. When she was applying for JTA, she was told that her course’s curriculum wasn’t fit for the program and that she might risk delaying her graduation. Lianna had to print all the subjects from each school she was applying for to see if her program director could credit them.

These efforts paid off when Lianna was given the go signal to apply for JTA. After a semester at the Université Catholique de Lille in France, where she studied Business/Managerial Economics, she took home a deep appreciation for new possibilities: “It really changed my outlook. I got to know people of different nationalities and saw that there’s really a bigger world out there.”

Lianna’s hunger for new experiences inspired her to challenge herself in different fields. She took her first internship in 2018 in Elite Realty PH’s marketing department. While there, she got to dabble in programming and financial modeling in Elite’s sister company FTI Consulting. In 2019, she interned in the Development Bank of the Philippines-Daiwa Capital Markets, allowing her to learn more about equity research. “I was able to apply the lessons I learned in AMF. I found it cool that it was helpful in the outside world,” she says.

Her interest in finance led her to represent the school in competitions. In 2018, Lianna was a national finalist for the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge and finished second in the 20th Inter-Collegiate Finance Competition. During her final year in Ateneo, her team was crowned 2020 CFA Institute Research Challenge National Champion.

More than numbers

Moving forward, Lianna hopes to find a flexible job that will allow her to explore new learnings. Though she leaves Ateneo as someone highly decorated in her field, she continues to search for opportunities that can expose her to new ways her work can have meaning.

One area she has developed an interest in recently is social development, as it would allow her to work on projects that benefit communities. It’s a cause that hits home for her, anchored in memories of recovering from the typhoon and participating in feeding programs. “I want to be able to create a change so I don’t really want to restrict my choices [purely] to finance or economics,” she says.

29 Lianna ends her college journey with a full heart, having made the most of the opportunities she was given. She dreams of being able to touch lives with what she has learned and gain memorable experiences along the way, wherever the journey takes her. Lianna