Ricardo Obregón Trujillo: an example to the new AIESEC generation.

“I define myself as a person with perseverance, who struggles, simple and most of all a leader – and a good part of what I have is owed to AIESEC “

These are Ricardo’s words when it comes to talk about himself. At the moment, he is the President of one of the most important companies in Colombia, the “Grupo Empresarial Bavaria”.

Ricardo gave AIESEC COLOMBIA a great thrust when it was going through one of its worst crisis and was threatened with extinction.

“At that time AIESEC was a very incipient organization, there was a local committee and the national committee was composed of only one person” Ricardo tells us.

He entered, as most of us, as a student, until he became president of the local committee. On his own initiative, he called upon a group of students who were working on the local committee in order to expand AIESEC to other cities,

“Thanks to the enthusiasm given by the organization, I thought that it was logical to share these ideas and experiences with other universities”.

Founder of five other AIESEC committees in the country, he was elected National President of AIESEC COLOMBIA.

Before being elected National President, Ricardo went on his first internship in Boston, United States when he was studying his eight semester at the Business Administration University – EAFIT - in Medellín.

“There is one day when your life changes, one day when one feels that an important step has been taken. For me, that was the time when my life changed.” Ricardo tells us with the same pride as thirty years ago.

“There is something that I really appreciated with that experience, I did not speak much English and I stayed at an American fraternity were we were only two Colombians. He was also an AIESEC member, and we promised each other that we would not speak Spanish during the year that we would be staying there.”

“It was a complicated process, but littler by little we developed that ability until we learned the language. I felt that I had really grown during that year," he adds.

Besides this experience, Ricardo went on three other internships abroad.

“The opportunity to open myself to the world gave me a competitive advantage which I now enjoy.

“What I am most grateful to AIESEC is its great virtue of giving us a vision that there is a world far beyond ours!”

Ricardo on Leadership

“Leadership can be recognized as the capacity that an individual has to agglutinate other people, feed from them, lay out projects that unite a great number, with some vision “.

In the same way he confirms now that he considers himself a real leader,

“Without saying it with some pretension, but in order to be today the President of Bavaria, one has to have gone though the recognition”

“Leadership is not only the work of only one person, it is the function that one person is able to achieve with a working team.”

Mr. Ricardo O. Trujillo is in the AIESEC Alumni Hall of Fame