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Priscila Silva (B.S. ISE '07)

By Andi Miller

Geeky confessions, milk cartons and a corporate dream

Priscila Silva is a memory girl.

Even now, with a little hindsight and maturity in her personal rearview, she laughs at her own precocious coed moxie — an audacious proclamation to the Dean of the College that he tells her he has not yet forgotten.

“I told him I wanted to be CEO of Procter & Gamble,” laughs Silva, 25, a native of Brazil and a 2007 industrial and systems engineering graduate. “He tells me he still remembers that. I’m going to work hard so I don’t let him down.”

Today, through the power of her own determination and some forceful goalsetting, Silva is well on her way to making that dream a reality, even as she says she’s backed off a tad on her own definition of success. Now in her second year at the Cincinnati-based corporate giant, she’s traveled as far away as China and Japan where she’s conducted market research interviews with foreign mothers on the right kind of Pampers-brand diapers best suited for their babies and their culture.

It’s not engineering, says the perpetually upbeat Silva, but she’s using concrete skills she learned in the College — the problem-solving, critical thinking and analysis — to put her own imprint on marketing P&G products.

“It’s the little things,” she says with a believable sass. “If the flavor of your toothpaste changes, that sucks. It’s very personal. At P&G we put a lot of thought in you getting the best quality. I get to touch the lives of millions of people.

“Some people like to do community service, some people like to join civic groups. Props to them, I think that’s great work,” she adds. “To me this is one way I find to help others — by giving them products that help. P&G was the first company to ever put fluoride in toothpaste... and it improves smiles and lives in small but meaningful ways. I thought ‘That’s amazing.’”

Silva also became a cheerleader in her own right of the P&G brand, ticking through a litany of well-known grooming and household tools like a spokeswoman badly in need of some airtime.

“I’m Hispanic and we love scents,” she confides, noting at age 15, the family moved to Miami. “Like the way I measure clean is through smell. Other people look for more visual cues — the brighter the white. It’s very dorky.”

She is loyal to Crest toothpaste and her Olay face cream — “I use the low end stuff because I’m not that old. I don’t need wrinkle protection — yet. “

And don’t forget the Febreeze candle, the Swiffer and her yummy Olay Ribbons (body wash). “It’s a little pricey but it’s totally worth it. I’m lazy and I forget to put on moisturizer, so this really helps with that.”

Spoken like a true girly girl but one who is driven enough to have already crafted her own glamorous bucket list that takes her to the far corners of the continents and back — she’s crossed off “climb Great Wall of China” but still hopes to “sled down the Olympic luge track in Lake Placid, N.Y. at 90 mph.” Then there’s “pet a kangaroo,” and stroll the Taj Mahal barefoot, along with attending the Cannes Film Festival and a real masked ball.

She lives her life surrounded by small motivational tools keeping her focused as she crafts some creativity into her consumerism. She dreams in practicality.

Driving to work, Silva favors silence over music so she can ponder the day ahead. The background screen on her cell phone reads “Push Yourself” and she’s an avid reader of both Psychology Today and Scientific American. Every Sunday, she reads postsecret.com, and honors her homeland with indulgences of Haagen-Dazs’ Passion Fruit and Rum Raisin ice creams “because they remind me of Brazil.”

At her 100-year-old apartment, her bathroom holds a cheeky secret: “I have three plastic bracelets I hang from my shower head I wore at a nudist resort. I keep them to remind me of how free spirited I felt. It’s not something I had ever done or will do again, but they remind me I need to always push myself outside of my day today comfort zone.”

But it’s her family and a road trip with the Silva crew to a Parmalat milk factory in Paraguay when she was 11 that seeded her fascination for product packaging. It’s a geeked-out confession, her wonderment at something so benign as a manufacturing assembly line for milk that leads her to spill the details of her career path.

“I was just fascinated by all those little boxes getting folded by robot machines, all put into packages and trucked without humans ever touching it,” she recalls. “That’s what makes me so excited by consumer goods. You look at a tube of toothpaste and you never think about what goes into making that. At Parmalat, I realized there is a lot of magic that happens behind everyday products and that to me is so beautiful, so seamless to the end user.”

She’s been accused of drinking the P&G Kool-aid, but says the company’s management philosophy of investing in people, cultivating their potential and promoting from within is in line with her own social consciousness view of the world.

“I love what it stands for, what it does, the people — leadership, ownership, passion for wining, integrity. Their values and my values are very much in line,” she says, adding that adjustment to life in the Midwest has been easy, even for someone who grew up in South America.

She allows she’s a long way from home, but she’s finding comfort in creating things that are used across the globe.

“I want to have an impact there,” she says of her goals at P&G, which include making good on what she told the Dean, though she sees herself a little wiser now.

“It’s not about being CEO,” Silva says. “I look at this like dropping a pebble in a lake — you get ripples. The higher you drop the pebble the farther away the ripples are going to go. The higher up I go in a company, the more ripples I can make every day.”