Braden Guliano has been a man on a mission at the University of South Carolina. In just three years, he completed a bachelor’s degree in integrated information technology at the Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing while completing multiple internships and launching his own tech consulting business on the side.
If that weren’t enough, Guliano plans to have completed an accelerated MBA program in the Darla Moore School of Business by next spring, the original target for his baccalaureate graduation. The Lexington, South Carolina, native says his academic and entrepreneurial journey began on the first day of sixth grade.
“I was sitting next to someone in homeroom who had this massive book, Arduino for Dummies, and when he told me how you could use it to program a credit card-sized computer, it really piqued my interest,” says Guliano, who had grown up playing with Snap Circuits. “After that I got into Python programming language and then joined my school’s Lego robotics team.”
A high school teacher cultivated Guliano’s keenness for technology by giving him different projects to work on, then encouraged him to make a presentation to researchers from USC’s Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing.
“I’ll never forget when I was done presenting, one of the researchers shook my hand and said, ‘I’d like you to come work with us this summer,’” Guliano says. “I was actually programming industrial robots in a future factory lab in the McNair Aerospace Center, which built my love for software and led me to USC before I had even made a decision about where I wanted to go to college.”
Guliano’s IIT major turned out to be a great choice as its curriculum of technology and business courses appealed to his entrepreneurial leanings. Not long after enrolling at USC, he shared his idea for starting a technology consulting business with staff in the university’s technology commercialization office.
“I started an LLC as a complete experiment to try to get some initial business experience and figure out what I want to do,” he says.
The experiment has been successful. Guliano has focused on helping companies explore whether artificial intelligence or automation might help their business, “and then I come up with a game plan and actually build it for them,” he says. He’s picked up two clients and is cultivating a third.
“In my whole experience at USC, I have put myself outside of my comfort zone.”
Along the way, Guliano found myriad opportunities with more internships. His initial summer experience in high school led to a robotics internship while an undergraduate. Guliano would later demonstrate to the tire manufacturer Michelin that a Boston Dynamics Spot robot could be programmed to visually inspect for defects on a factory manufacturing line. Michelin was convinced by his proof-of-concept presentation and purchased a Spot robot for that purpose.
He also landed an internship as a remote software developer with Telit deviceWISE, a technology firm, and took on yet another internship with Scout Motors the summer before his senior year, again applying the defect-sensing robot technology. That internship might have led to full-time employment, he says, “but I kind of realized that I want to spend my time focused on my clients and building out my LLC while I work on the MBA.”
It’s easy to imagine that Guliano has always been like this — confident in his plans and articulate in his vision for carrying them out.
“It’s funny — I was very introverted when I came to USC, which fits the stereotype of introverted people in software fields,” he says. “What changed me were the internships and the mentors I had here. I had to learn how to interact with people who are older than me and how to showcase ideas not just to engineers but to executives.”
Guliano credits a freshman speech class with jumpstarting the process of being comfortable and more outgoing in front of others. Those soft skills, combined with the rest of his collegiate experience — academics, internships and mentoring — have transformed Guliano into a different person.
“In my whole experience at USC, I have put myself outside of my comfort zone,” he says. “I’ve learned how to present myself, and going down this entrepreneurial route, you have to learn not just how to network your products or your services — you’ve got to network yourself.”