Santiago Luna - Cultura Ambassador

November 22, 2019

He grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Austin, TX., and Toulouse, France; & spoke 3 languages by the age of 11 and visited 18 countries by the age of 18.

During his College days, Santiago received a BA in Sociology at UNAM in Mexico City and he worked as a research assistant and social media manager to a famous novelist in Mexico, Elena Poniatowska. He created her Twitter account, which went from 0 to 300K by the time he finished managing her account. He also dabbled in the professional theater arena . and attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Summer Institute for General Management, which is a 1-month residential program.

While at Stanford business school, he discovered a couple of things about himself, 1) He felt he did not have enough experience to apply right away and 2) that it was very expensive. Thus, he decided to redirect himself and applied to graduate programs at schools that offered International Affairs programs. To be admitted, he studied for the GRE and GMAT intensively for 8 months straight. He was admitted to The George Washington University's Elliot School of International Affairs, where he was given the Slim Scholarship. He felt very lucky as the scholarship granted included full tuition along with a nice monthly stipend.

He studied 'Global Communications Master Program', which allowed him to take business and communication classes. His favorite class being Integrated Marketing Communications.

During his master’s Santiago also interned at a PR and marketing firm in New Orleans, where he spent the summer, named Bond-Moroch and another internship at the Atlantic Council, a prestigious Think Tank in D.C. He also managed to participate in a group capstone project focused on giving the local chamber of commerce of Cologne, Germany a proposal on how to integrate refugees. Besides the Slim Scholarship, he was awarded two other awards during his master’s program.

After completing his master’s degree in the Spring of 2017, he became an independent contractor doing marketing projects in Guadalajara, Mexico and Silicon Valley. His first project was joining a team in redesigning the UX for Ahaa.org, the largest network of LGBT members in the Middle East, a project founded by The Mozilla Foundation. He then improved the digital communications of prominent doctors (Guadalajara is an international hub for 'medical tourism’). He enjoyed this very much! The most prominent plastic surgeon in Guadalajara, Dr Lazaro Cardenas, who performs surgery particularly on transgender people from all around the world, hired him so that he could focus on his website and Facebook site, which became his training ground. To date, Santiago has worked as a contractor with more than 15 different companies (mostly in tech) helping them improve their products and digital communications.