We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nina a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nina, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I don’t think of myself as a particularly risky person, but my friends would disagree.

First of all, I moved from the Philippines to the United States of America in 2019 on a scholarship from New York University to be an actor. I was eighteen years old when I had to navigate living on my own, the American healthcare system—the pandemic. I stayed throughout a monumental couple of years, unable to return home, and had to figure out where my next meal was coming from every single day.

That said, the risk I want to tell you about is the risk I’m currently taking. Risks and opportunity isn’t a single moment, but an accumulation of them. It’s miracles happening because you were at the right place at the right time once, and then a deliberate decision to continue pursuing that luck past the windfall.

I got my first stable job this year at Corrado & Martella, P.C., a boutique law firm in Jersey City. Within the past eight months of this budding career, I have learned about contract law within real estate transactions, leases, and estate law through creating Revocable Trusts. In the first quarter of 2026, I helped generate over six figures worth of revenue for the firm. Also within this time, I applied to law school in one of the most competitive admissions cycles in history and earned my spot in a part-time program I’ll be attending in the fall with an 80% scholarship.

It looks like miracles upon miracles, but it wasn’t.

I got the job because I was starting my first bookstore and spoke at a networking event in Jersey City. I was trying to acquaint myself with the neighborhood I fell in love with, with other Filipino small business owners just like me. I had just left my job at the YMCA in Brooklyn to dive into networks and learning, living off a barely-livable budget in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

At the event, I met a couple marketing their cookbook. I worked on their social media, part-time and remotely, for about six months. I also helped schedule their book signings, which meant researching and cold-calling almost every bookstore within New Jersey and New York—of which, there are a lot.

I was looking for full-time work to sustain myself when one of my coworkers told me their sister-in-law’s firm was hiring. So, in the middle of a sweltering heatwave, dizzy from the suit and the twenty minute walk between the interview and another networking event, I trekked to The Heights, where I interviewed for my first legal job.

I talked about how I wanted to go to law school back in 2022, when I graduated college, but my mom said no. I talked about how I go to sleep, listening to Emily D. Baker’s trial commentary on YouTube. I talked about how I wanted somewhere to grow, somewhere I could put roots down—a privilege I never really allowed myself to have before.

When I got the job, I coincidentally met other paralegals around the area from firms in the city, and, on a drunken dare on a Friday night, took an LSAT practice test. I scored a 172 that night.

I told myself I’d only take the LSAT if I could get a fee waiver (and I did). I told myself I’d only consider law school if I got into a program I loved with a scholarship (and I did). I told myself I’d only do it if it meant I could keep my job (and I have, so far).

Now, I’m risking the life I know, the life I worked so hard to build, for a life I want.

It means working the forty hours and skipping lunches. It means going to work thinking about how I’m going to make things better for me tomorrow. In the fall, it will mean committing to getting my JD on top of it all.

On my commute to work today, I wondered if my luck was going to run out. Then I realized: at some point, you have to accept it isn’t luck making it work—it’s you.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Once upon a time, I used to be a storyteller.

I acted on stages and on film. It was what I came to America to do. In 2023, I had just gotten my first costar job after a long WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike on Blue Bloods, and I was so sure I was going to go somewhere. I learned how to shoot films, I got my own camera with that first windfall, and come that Christmas, I felt like I had a path forward.

Then my mom died 5 days before it.

My entire life changed. One second, I was with my friends playing a D&D session with my boyfriend. The next, my mom was dying on the other side of the world. I did the hardest job I ever had to do in my life: I acted.

I put a smile on my face, and tried to laugh at jokes, and, sure, my mom was dying, but I didn’t want to ruin Christmas. It was her favorite holiday.

I got the call with the view of a rising sun a day after the party, and I felt something in me snap.

Suddenly, all the world wasn’t a stage, and I didn’t want to be a player. What I wanted was to survive.

I needed a stable income. I needed order, as the chaos of grief opened below my feet and threatened to swallow me whole. I went searching, really looking, like I was homesick for something I never once knew. Then, when I couldn’t find it, I decided to make it.

I’m going to be an attorney.

I’m going to go to law school, and after that, I’m going to pass the bar. I’m going to learn about every gap in the system, the pitfalls I narrowly escaped and fell through in equal measure, and I’ll help other people navigate it too.

Then, I’m going to open that bookstore for her. Because she and I fought about everything, but never the words between pages.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Everything Taylor Swift. Literally, I’m listening to “Ruin the Friendship” right now.

I graduated from NYU in 2022, which meant the highlight of my graduation wasn’t my diploma but the fact that Taylor Swift attended my graduation (and her own, and that of everybody else graduating NYU that year).

Her speech is available on YouTube, but I filmed the same thin on my phone. She’s a shaky, grainy pixel on my iPhone 13, but it was taken from my view that day, and I still listen to it. I listen to it when I miss my mom because somewhere in that video the woman who raised me (for better or worse) was alive.

Taylor Swift is the reason I feel like I can make mistakes, get back up, try again, rinse and repeat until it works.

I’ve listened to her since she released “Love Story” in 2008. I was seven years old.

I grew up along side her ever-evolving discography. Through country, alternative, pop, folk—she has allowed herself the grace of trying something new without knowing for certain that it would work. So now, as I work with my coworkers and mentees, I make sure they know about all the times I have done something without knowing how it was going to work out: the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all.

I don’t let them feel like failure is something to be ashamed of because it isn’t: it’s something to learn from. It’s an opportunity that we just have to take.

Taylor Swift taught me about making sure the people you work with feel appreciated, from handwritten notes to gifts. She taught me about the importance of leading smart while balancing it with your heart. As a leader, you have to be able to make space for how people feel—clients, coworkers, collaborators—but that doesn’t happen unless you make space for how you feel first.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When someone with authority says you should do something, that is the only way to do it.

Exhibit A: my whole life.

When I was studying for the LSAT, I thought that meant having to bury my head in LSAT prep books.

I have pretty severe ADHD. I sometimes look at my old neuropsychological exam and I think it’s a miracle I can hold a glass of water. You may also recall that I did my LSAT diagnostic on a drunken dare and scored a 172.

So imagine my unwarranted surprise when I discovered the next test I took, I scored ten points lower because I overthought every single word I read.

I did it because these books told me, with authority, that there was a certain way to do the test. There was a certain way to think. There was a certain way to strategize. All of those ways might work for people, but they do not work for me.

Through studying for the LSAT, I actually got my best scores when I didn’t study at all.

When I put down the books for a week because work was crazy, when I traded the reading comp for the novels I loved, when I had a glass of white wine and played Phoenix Wright—I scored significantly better. Leaps and bounds.

(I will die on the hill that Phoenix Wright is essentially Logical Reasoning, gamified.)

I was faster when I didn’t translate how I thought to how I thought I should think, then back again. I was better when I trusted myself and developed my own system to approach the questions.

Sometimes, what works for someone else doesn’t work for you. That doesn’t make you crazy, it makes you human.

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