Graduate School of Business:Finding her path

Stephanie Contreras’ first lesson in work ethic began with a loose thread.

Her mother worked the night shift at an embroidery factory—stitching hats mainly—and from a young age, Contreras’ job was to inspect the final products and snip away at any stray threads. Once, exhausted, she suggested that they just let the occasional imperceptible imperfection through. The rustling of the embroidery machine stopped. Her mother looked at her.

“This is the standard we keep ourselves to,” she said. “We deliver great work.”

Those words didn’t just stay with Contreras. They became the blueprint for how she moved through the world.

Contreras grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the oldest of four. She was in high school when the pandemic shut both her parents’ jobs simultaneously. Needing a way to survive, Contreras and her mother started an embroidery business of their own, working out of a garage. Contreras pitched in at every level, from sourcing clients and managing customer relationships to order placement and final delivery. She spent nights teaching herself how to digitize new designs, all while finishing high school and looking after her younger siblings. 

Somewhere in the chaos, she submitted an application to Stanford University. It was a dream—and a longshot.

“I decided I wasn’t going to say no to myself before I got a letter saying so formally,” she says.

The letter said yes. Contreras would become the first in her family to graduate from high school and attend college.

At Stanford, she majored in human biology; she’d always been curious about how people work. Then, with the announcement of a new program from the Graduate School of Business, she discovered a way to learn how organizations work. Pathfinder would offer courses taught by GSB faculty in leadership, decision making, markets, organizations, and entrepreneurship. Designed for undergraduates and coterminal students across Stanford, it would help them apply a business mindset to the fields they already care about, whether those fields are human biology, engineering, history, public service, or the arts.

Contreras had learned how a business survives by instinct. What she craved was a framework, a foundational understanding of the forces at play.

Pathfinder launched in Contreras’ junior year. Joseph Piotroski, the Robert K. Jaedicke Professor of Accounting and faculty director of the program, describes Pathfinder as a strategic complement to the broad liberal education they’re already receiving, not as a substitute for one.

The first Pathfinder course Contreras took was Becoming Effective Leaders, taught by Frank Flynn, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Organizational Behavior. The course gave students repeated practice with leadership problems: how to understand another party’s priorities, how to negotiate with incomplete information, how to communicate when the stakes are high, and how to adapt a general concept to a specific setting.

“The class is highly experiential,” Flynn says. “We don’t just offer lectures on the subject of leadership. Students get their hands dirty.”

Contreras' got dirty right away. That same quarter, she was working to formalize a nonprofit, which she and some classmates had founded to bring interactive and accessible recreational activities to young patients at the Ronald McDonald House Charities facility near campus. Contreras knew she’d have to sell the facility’s director on the idea. She went back to her notes from Flynn’s negotiations module. Instead of pitching what she wanted, she mapped what the partner needed. She prepared documentation, anticipated objections, and framed the conversation around the responsibilities the organization had to the children and families it served.

The partnership was secured on that first call. Two years later, Cards 4 Kids has broadened into an organization with projects around the country.

“That relationship would never have been possible if I hadn’t learned what it takes to go into a conversation like that,” she says. She still has the slide deck.

Her next Pathfinder course, Introduction to Business II, gave her a different kind of tool. When the class covered the three core financial statements, something clicked. For years, Contreras had been running the customer side of her family’s embroidery operation on instinct—tracking what came in, what went out, what the business needed to survive. Now she was beginning to understand it.

After one of her classes, she promptly called her mother. “How are we tracking our finances?” she asked. “Let’s put numbers to these things.” 

Her mother handed over the records. That week, Contreras built a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement for the embroidery business. 

The exercise did not turn her into an accountant. It gave her a way to see the business differently: what was coming in, what was going out, where timing mattered, and which questions better information could answer.

For Piotroski, that is the pattern. Many Stanford undergraduates already have strong instincts and a bias toward action. Pathfinder gives those instincts a vocabulary and a framework.

“I hope they look back at their time at the GSB as a point of inflection,” Piotroski says, “that these courses actually changed the trajectory they were on.”

Flynn sees a related need. Stanford graduates often enter roles where they are asked to lead before they have formal authority, read organizational dynamics before they have seniority, and make decisions with imperfect information. Pathfinder gives undergraduates a place to practice those skills before the stakes rise.

“We wouldn’t be doing them a good service,” Flynn says, “if we didn’t help them prepare.”

When Contreras graduated in June 2025, she hadn’t left human biology behind, but rather added a second lens. She moved back to Los Angeles to begin a management development position at an industrial supply company. It’s a role that asks her to learn how an organization works across its people, processes, customers, and finances. She still refers to her Pathfinder notes regularly. 

The job is a new direction, but not a clean break from where she started. After work, most evenings, Contreras drives straight to the family embroidery business, now operating out of a proper establishment in South Central. Inside, amid the hum of the machines, her mother and brothers work late into the night. Contreras works right beside them.

This was Contreras’ first classroom. Years later, she still upholds that same standard of work she learned from her mother. But something has changed. Contreras now sees not just the fabric but the business itself, and what’s needed to make it thrive.