When Marina stepped up to help cut the ribbon on our brand new Midtown Manhattan campus, the moment was never really about the fresh paint or the shiny new classrooms. It was about something a lot harder to put on a floor plan.

We told her she was one of the most “full circle” people in Miami Ad School history. Her first reaction, in her own words, was something like “cool, no pressure.” Her second reaction, once she actually sat with it, was realizing we might have been right.

Because a little over a decade ago, Marina walked into a Miami Ad School classroom in São Paulo with absolutely no idea what advertising even was. She thought CP+B was a drink order. (It is not. It’s Crispin Porter + Bogusky, one of the most legendary agencies in the industry, and she found that out the hard way, mid-conversation, in front of people who very much did not think it was a drink.)

Last month, she stood in our new campus as a Group Creative Director, an alum, a teacher, and a mentor, and helped us open the doors to whatever comes next.

Nobody Has a Master Plan

If there’s one thing I want you to take from Marina’s speech, it’s this: she did not have a ten-year plan. She studied industrial design. Then graphic design. Then, briefly, astronomy, before realizing her brain was not built for orbital mechanics. She came back to creativity because that’s genuinely where she landed, not because she planned it that way.

What actually changed her life was one person. Her friend Mari Guedes looked at her and basically said: you’ve always loved selling your ideas more than designing them, and advertising is the exact overlap of creativity and entrepreneurship you didn’t know you were looking for.

That’s it. That’s the whole pivot. One sentence, from one person who saw something in her before she saw it in herself.

The Part Nobody Puts on a Highlight Reel

Here’s what I appreciated most about Marina’s speech: she refused to make it sound easy.

It wasn’t. It was four continents. It was visa paperwork that would break a person. It was getting ghosted by hundreds of job applications and talking herself into opening a coffee shop instead approximately every twenty minutes. It was genuinely, repeatedly, asking herself if she was good enough, if she belonged, if any of it was working.

And through all of it, one thing kept happening. Wherever she landed, whatever unfamiliar city she found herself in, she looked for Miami Ad School people. And there was always someone. Someone who picked up the phone. Someone who made an introduction. Over enough years, that stopped being a network and started being family, so much so that a third of her wedding in Uruguay was Miami Ad School people. Classmates as bridesmaids. A classmate officiating. The room full of former mentors who’d become friends.

Then She Became the Teacher

Nine years ago, Marina walked back into a Miami Ad School classroom, except this time she was the one at the front of the room.

She described it exactly how you’d expect: terrifying. Suddenly everyone’s looking at you like you know what you’re doing, and internally you’re just thinking, huh, I guess I’m the adult now.

But here’s the part that actually stuck with me. She said she thought she was there to teach students, and instead they kept teaching her right back. Challenging assumptions she didn’t even realize she still held. Asking questions she hadn’t thought to ask in years. Making work good enough that she half joked she might be putting herself out of a job.

She’s spent nine years watching nervous, unsure students turn into confident creative directors, watching them win awards, watching them turn around and become the person who opens a door for somebody else. And that, more than any title she’s held, is what she said actually stuck with her.

What We’re Actually Opening

Standing next to Jarek and Vasti, in front of a room full of students, alumni, and mentors, Marina said something that I think is the whole point of this new campus, more than any of us could have written ourselves.

Miami Ad School is not a building. This one is beautiful, genuinely, the light, the space, all of it. But the school has always been the people who keep showing up for each other, year after year, city after city.

Her advice to anyone walking through our doors for the first time was simple. Your career is not going to look like the plan in your head, and that’s a good thing. Make the weird idea. Go to the place that scares you. Talk to the person you think is too important to talk to. Don’t get so senior that you get boring. And remember, you don’t need an entire city to believe in you. You need one person. And when you find that person, hold onto it, because eventually it’ll be your turn to be that person for somebody else.

Was all of it, the moves, the visas, the doubt, worth it?

Her answer: hell yeah. It was absolutely worth it.

Welcome home, New York. Let’s make some noise.