When she arrived at the University of Arizona, Florence Luna tested out of her language requirement. But she didn’t want to take a shortcut and miss taking advantage of everything the university had to offer.
Luna, a first generation American whose first language was Spanish, started exploring what she was interested in and decided she wanted to study something both practical and challenging.
“I wanted to expand the communities with which I could connect and have a more well-rounded experience. For me, that meant picking up a language,” she said. “I knew I wanted to leverage my education as far as I could, so I looked into a lot of different, more challenging languages, like Russian, Mandarin and Arabic.”
Luna considered parts of the world where knowing the language could help her leverage her economics major, as well as what exposure she had to languages through pop culture, and landed on Mandarin.
“I decided that I would just do one semester of Mandarin Chinese 101. After that, I went on to 202, and then I kept going and picked up Buddhist meditation and Japanese and Chinese nationalism and other courses until my advisor surprised me to say that I was only a few classes away from a degree in East Asian Studies,” she said. “At first, pursuing this out of a passion, I didn’t realize how it was a crucial component of preparing for my career.”
Luna, who graduated in 2015 with a B.A. in East Asian Studies and a B.S. in Business Economics, is the recipient of the College of Humanities 2025-26 Young Professional Achievement Award.
As an undergraduate, Luna studied abroad for one summer in Shanghai, an experience that helped develop her language skills and her appreciation for the culture, but also helped secure her first internship, with BMW in China. She also interned with Goldman Sachs and continued with the company after graduating. She went on to earn an MBA from Cornell University and today, she is co-founder and CEO of Fig Medical, which spun out of the university and secured investment capital.
Reflecting on her career path, Luna said her East Asian Studies degree has helped in both expected and unexpected ways.
“At first, I was pursuing this out of a passion. I didn’t realize how it wasn’t tangential to my career preparation, but actually a crucial component,” she said. “Mandarin was a difficult language, and it was incredibly enriching and fulfilling to be able to learn this incredibly difficult language. It gave me a lot of courage to continue to face other challenges, I was able to kind of use that same courage and kind of tap into all of those characteristics that I developed.”
Luna also applies humanities skills at her healthcare startup, Fig Medical, a prior authorization software that streamlines the administrative burden for doctors by using AI to improve the likelihood that the prior authorization will be approved, getting patients care sooner and doctors reimbursed faster.
“The patients who are impacted, the doctors that we’re communicating with, the executives who are running hospitals, they are often coming from all sorts of places in the United States, and outside the United States, with all sorts of cultural backgrounds,” she said. “Understanding how to communicate across cultures, and also understanding how important a perspective is that is very culturally different than your own, is increasingly important to building solutions.”