I still remember the day I decided to leave Brazil. It wasn’t an easy decision, nor was it precisely planned. It was one of those moments when life holds you up to a mirror and asks: is this really what you want?
At the time, I worked in accounting, I had stability, but I felt something essential was missing—a purpose, a broader horizon, a sense of real growth.
I wanted more than a job; I wanted to build a story that had meaning.
And, as daunting as it seemed, this calling led me to an unlikely destination: Dublin, Ireland.
I arrived with limited English, few resources, and many uncertainties. At first, nothing seemed to fit. I had a solid education, but it wasn’t worth much in a place where I could barely express myself.
That’s how I started from scratch—literally. My first job was as a waiter in a restaurant. It was exhausting and, for my ego, disconcerting.
I came from an environment where I was professionally recognized, and suddenly I found myself cleaning tables and trying to understand orders with accents that seemed indecipherable.
But it was in this contrast that I began to understand the value of humility and reinvention.
Working as a waiter taught me something that no spreadsheet or accounting report had taught me: the importance of listening, observing, and connecting with people.
Each customer was a new English lesson, each shift an exercise in resilience. And it was in this simple daily routine that I realized what truly drives human beings—the desire to grow, to learn, and to adapt.
Little by little, I began to feel that this new beginning, however difficult it might be, was preparing me for something bigger.
Entrepreneurship entered my life almost as a natural consequence of this process.
I saw so many Brazilian students arriving in Ireland with the same difficulties I had faced: the language barrier, the culture shock, the fear of the unknown.
That’s when an idea began to take shape — to create a school that was more than just an English course, one that would welcome, guide, and help people rebuild their lives in another country. This idea became SEDA College.
SEDA was born small, with limited resources and many challenges, but with a clear mission: to transform education into real opportunity.
Today, looking back, I realize that it all started on the day I decided to leave Brazil without knowing exactly what I would find. Each obstacle, each new beginning, and each shift spent working in silence were part of a larger learning process.
Starting over is an act of courage, but also of faith — faith in oneself and in the purpose that does not yet exist, but which reveals itself along the way.
Ireland taught me that life does not reward those who have all the answers, but rather those who are willing to learn as they go along.
And that’s what I continue trying to do to this day: move forward, one day at a time, learning, making mistakes, reinventing myself, and always remembering that sometimes you need to get completely lost in order to finally find yourself.
