Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

I&F Decision Science Assoc. Manager @ Accenture | Applied Scientific Researcher

Personal daily events

2025

The Desert

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Working at Minera Centinela in Antofagasta and the Atacama desert is something you have to see in person. Coming from the forests of southern Chile, this is the opposite end of the country in every sense. Dry, vast, and strangely beautiful. The mine itself is massive – you feel small standing next to those trucks. The flight from Santiago to Antofagasta is barely two hours, but it feels like arriving on another planet. Where I grew up everything is green and wet; here, it hasn’t rained in years. The mine camp life takes some getting used to – wake up, bus to site, work, bus back, dinner at the camp cafeteria, sleep, repeat. The food is surprisingly decent though, you can’t complain about that. The dry air hits you immediately; your lips crack, your nose bleeds if you’re not careful. The sunsets out here are unreal though. Not a bad office view.

2024

Back to School

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Started the Master’s program in Project Management at Universidad de Vina del Mar. After years of leading projects mostly by instinct and whatever I picked up along the way, it felt like the right time to formalize those skills. The irony of a PhD going back for a professional master’s is not lost on me. After leading analytics teams, data science projects, and client engagements for years – mostly figuring it out as I went – I realized I needed the formal toolkit. Scope, risk, stakeholder management, all the things I’d been doing by gut feel. There’s something funny about sitting in a classroom again after defending a doctoral thesis, but honestly, the PhD taught me how to research, not how to manage a budget or a Gantt chart. The first classes were surprisingly practical. Less theory than I expected, more real-world frameworks. Balancing work at Accenture and classes again is going to be interesting, but I’ve done the work-study juggle before. Here we go again.

Consulting Life

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Started at Accenture Industry X. The corporate world is a different beast – more structured, more processes, more acronyms than I can keep track of. But there’s something exciting about working at the intersection of technology and strategy for mining companies. The problems are similar to what I’ve seen before, but the perspective is wider now. Instead of being inside one operation, I’m looking across multiple clients and industries. Different pace, but I think I’ll like it here.

One Month Solo

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For a brief window between leaving CODELCO and joining Accenture, I went solo. Independent consulting, just me and my laptop. The project was interesting – clay classification using hyperspectral drone imagery, which is exactly the kind of niche problem I love. The freedom of being your own boss is intoxicating: no meetings about meetings, no corporate overhead, just the work. But the uncertainty is real too. You’re one client away from having nothing. It gave me a new respect for people who do this full-time. A short chapter, but a useful one – sometimes you need to taste independence to appreciate what structure gives you.