From Dom. Rep to the world.

Stephanie Nuesi was born and raised in Los Mameyes, Santo Domingo Este — a community where she studied by candlelight, shared a computer that turned off every fifteen minutes, and dreamed of a future bigger than what surrounded her.

At 16, she made one of the hardest decisions of her life: leaving the Dominican Republic alone to emigrate to the United States. She arrived with one suitcase, a notebook full of dreams, and barely any English. She walked for hours to attend free English classes at a public library, convinced that learning the language would be her first bridge to a new life.

In less than a year she mastered English and landed her first job. She became the first in her family to graduate from a U.S. university — Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business — and later worked on Wall Street at Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, and PricewaterhouseCoopers before joining Google, where she has been promoted twice in just two years.

During the pandemic she completed a program at MIT in Data Science, Machine Learning & AI. She has been invited to speak at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Manchester. But what fills her most is seeing young Dominicans land their first interview, job, or scholarship thanks to Max Up — that is why she started.