Before any uniform, any deal, any title, there was Curitiba. I grew up in a city that taught me three things that have never left me: the value of family, the power of friendship, and the discipline that only sport can build. These are not backstory. They are the foundation everything else was built on.
At 18, I chose to serve. I finished first in my officer cohort and was awarded the Medalha Correa Lima, the highest distinction given to the top graduate. But what the military gave me was not a medal. It was the understanding that leadership is not about authority. It is about being the person who goes first, carries the most, and asks for the least.
By day · Army
By night · UniversityWhile serving full time, I attended university at night. No margin for error. No room for excuses. Just the discipline of showing up to both, every single day, when it would have been easier not to. That period taught me something I could not have learned any other way: that the limit you think you have is almost never the real one.
My father passed away, and the business he spent his life building was weeks from collapse. I was not an advisor brought in to solve it. I was the family.
I sold assets, renegotiated debt, and kept everything he had worked for from disappearing. That experience taught me something no case study can replicate: that corporate distress is not a financial problem with a financial solution. It is a human one.
I joined a private equity firm focused on distressed asset acquisitions. I learned to read broken capital structures and find the value others had stopped looking for. Every deal was a puzzle built from someone else's crisis. I grew to love that work, not despite the complexity, but because of it.
Every deal was a puzzle built from someone else's crisis.
While working full time in private equity, I pursued the CFA designation. I did not do it because someone asked me to. I did it because I knew the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was technical, and I was the only one who could close it.
The MBA is not an ending point. It is a bridge between everything I have learned and everything I want to become. Johnson is where I will sharpen the advisory skills, build the institutional network, and gain the platform to operate at the level I am targeting. The next chapter begins here.
My goal is to join the Levered Finance and Restructuring group of a leading investment bank in New York, as an Associate, advising companies at their most critical moments. Every chapter of my life, the uniform, the family crisis, the distressed deals, has been preparing me for exactly this. The room where the hardest problems get solved and the stakes are real.