A life across rules, kitchens, and languages.

“If I had to be born again, I would not change a single thing.”

If I woke up tomorrow on the first day of my life, I think it would be hard for me not to walk back into all of the same rooms. My experiences are what taught me everything I know now, and a different path would not have given me the same lessons. It has been difficult, of course. But some people look at the years and see a burden. I look at them and see a virtue. I have learned things from life that, honestly, no book could teach me.

Even as I write this, I know I cannot quite imprint that experience onto anyone else. I can only go as far as language will take me. So let me try.

I grew up in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, in a house where the kitchen was the center of everything. My mother and father raised me there, and so did a woman who came through our doors one day and became, in time, my sister. I would not see my life the same way without her. I have one sister by blood, Pamela, who happens to be a PMP herself, and who has also saved me so many times, in so many different ways. I am also the aunt of two nieces, which I will tell you is one of the more important jobs I will ever hold.

I learned the things I am most likely to write about here, the things that matter, in the way you learn the most important things in any household. I watched. I helped. I asked questions when there was a moment for them. The market on Saturdays was its own kind of school, and the women who ran the stalls were my first teachers in negotiation, in instinct, and in respect for the quiet work behind a plate of food. By the time I was old enough to study formally, I had already been studying for years.

When the time came, I went to law school at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, the PUCMM, which is one of the oldest universities in my country, and I graduated in 2010 with the Dominican equivalent of a Juris Doctor. My first practice in the law was at a construction firm called Constructora Acosta Bello, which we all knew as CONABESA, where I drafted contracts, interviewed clients, advised on regulatory matters, and learned, very early, that the most expensive sentence in any document is the one nobody reads carefully.

From there I went on to corporate banking law, which is where I spent most of my twenties. I joined Banco BHD de la República Dominicana as a Junior Legal Officer and led the consolidation team for the legal revision department during the bank’s merger with another institution, a multi-stakeholder project across legal, compliance, and operations that taught me, in a hurry, how to coordinate complicated work under pressure. After that I joined Banco del Progreso de la República Dominicana, the bank that is today Scotiabank, where I rose to Senior Legal Officer and handled loan formalizations, mortgage radiation letters, credit processing, and the corporate banking agreements that move actual money between actual companies. By the time I stepped out of the firm in 2017, I had spent five years learning to read contracts the way some people read novels, and I already knew I would not stay there forever.

In late 2017 I founded Canela Beading Studio under my own company, Grupo Paufer S.R.L. I sourced merchandise from China, built the brand from nothing, set up the supply chain, ran the finances, and recruited a small team. It was the first business that was mine, and the lessons came quickly: customs declarations, margins, inventory cycles, the particular optimism that any first-time entrepreneur learns the hard way. A few years later, in 2021, I opened Lo Pecao Seafood Bistro through Pisek Solutions S.R.L. and served Santo Domingo for three years as its founder and general manager. I wrote the menu. I built the supplier network. I wrote the staff training program. I managed catering operations. I passed every health inspection with zero violations, which I mention because I worked very hard for it.

In 2024 I left the Dominican Republic and landed in Vancouver, on the other side of the continent. The Pacific Northwest is a very long way from the Caribbean, and the contrast still surprises me, the way the light is different, the way people queue, the patience the rain demands of everyone who lives here. Like many immigrants, I did not arrive with a job waiting for me, so I took the work that was honest and available. I joined Union Latinos Restaurant as Kitchen and Production Manager, where I led the redesign of the kitchen production system across two locations and consolidated food preparation into a single centralized commissary, documented the recipe library with standardized specifications, and ran the costing that informed the menu’s pricing. From there I spent a season at Stanley Park Brewing Restaurant & Brewpub as a line cook, which I will tell you is one of the most honest jobs in any city, and I do not regret a single shift.

While that was happening, I went back to school. In August 2024 I began a Master of Science in Management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an online program I continue today, and I also enrolled in an MBA at University Canada West in Vancouver, where the coursework has covered Digital Transformation, Business Analytics, Machine Learning, and the Application of AI in Business. I graduate in April 2026. In September 2025 I joined the Office of Research and Scholarship at University Canada West as a Research Assistant, where I contribute to URSA, the Urban Resilience and Sustainability Alliance, a UCW-founded initiative working with partners across Canada and Europe. My work involves literature reviews, quantitative and qualitative analysis using SPSS and NVivo, and weaving AI tools into research workflows so the work moves faster without losing rigor.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I rediscovered the world through AI. Not as a shortcut. Not as a quiet hack to do less work. As a new door. AI, for me, is a way to read more and learn more and build more, and to reach into corners of knowledge that used to require a team of specialists to enter. I do not believe it is a magic trick. I believe it is a tool, and a profoundly democratic one. For the first time, a single-location restaurant or a two-employee shop can have the kind of analytical support that used to be reserved for businesses large enough to hire a consultant, and that asymmetry is, finally, starting to break.

That is the work I want to do next. I want to teach small entrepreneurs, the ones who run shops and kitchens and trades and quiet little firms with a handful of people, how to build personalized systems that fit their actual operation. The tools are within reach now, the ones that companies like Anthropic have made affordable enough that a single-location business can finally afford its own kind of automation. Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, NotebookLM. None of them require a million-dollar budget anymore, and that changes everything.

For the record, and because credentials are sometimes what people are looking for, I hold a PMP from the Project Management Institute and the Google Project Management Certificate from Coursera, and I keep a few other smaller certifications current because I am the kind of person who never quite stops studying. I work in three languages: English and Spanish are home, and French I keep at conversational, intermediate. I read widely. I cook constantly. I am most myself in the messy middle of a project that does not yet exist.

If you want to see other corners of me, I’m also over on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and on Instagram. Or you can write to me directly at hello@ilianapaulino.com. I read everything, and I write back.