Marina Ananias `26 is a go-getter. From her hometown, Maceió, Brazil, to Arizona, to Grinnell and beyond, she has been persistent in all of her endeavors in her four years at Grinnell.
Ananias grew up with her grandparents. Her grandfather had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease. “My grandmother wanted something to distract me, something I could engage and focus with despite everything that was happening in the house,” she said. She began playing the guitar at age five.
From there, she branched out to other instruments like flute and piano, in addition to singing. “Music has been something in my life that is constant, and I know it’s always there when I need it.”
The first time she had contact with music theory was when she left Maceió to attend boarding school in Arizona in 2019. She knew she wanted to follow it academically in college.
Ananias discovered Grinnell through the Brazilian Student Association (BRASA), a global network of Brazilian students abroad. She was paired with Diego Colhoes Rodrigues `25 through BRASA’s mentorship program. “Diego was involved with music too, which was nice, because he shared with me a lot of the things that I was gonna experience here,” she said.
Before coming to Grinnell, she took a gap year, where she returned home and completed an internship with Youtuber Nerd Musician, who helps people build creative sound tools. She helped with student support and built a prototype MIDI device to help songwriters create harmonies.
A computer science and music double major with significant coursework in neuroscience, Ananias has found ways to bridge divisions in her work. “Neuroscience takes a bit from both music and computer science,” she said.
In spring 2023, Ananias took the Global Learning Program (GLP) course ANT/GWS-195: Sumak Kawsay and Ikigai: Living Well and Finding Meaning in a Global World, where she traveled to Ecuador over spring break and Japan in May.
This course sparked her scientific interest in how health influences well-being across cultures, leading her to take psychology courses.
In her neuroscience seminar, she wrote a research paper on the impact of excessive exercise on degenerative diseases like ALS. “I am very curious about understanding what makes us live well, and what is a happy life,” she said. “It was a cool way to explore that in a scientific view.”
In PHY-116: Universe & Its Structure, Ananias composed a musical piece for her final project that aimed to mimic the collision of gravitational waves in space.
She was inspired by the sound we receive from gravitational waves, which sounds like a drop of water.
“One of the ways a gravitational wave can be created is if two black holes collide,” she said. “The piece starts with two different instruments, each representing a different black hole, and then it gets more intense, until eventually they collide.”
In MUS-322: Instrument Making, Ananias said she utilized some of the skills from her internship with Nerd Musician when using MaKey MaKey — an invention kit that connects everyday objects to computer keys — to devise instruments.
Ananias said the best part of her time at Grinnell was her off-campus travel experiences.
She traveled to the Yucatán region of Mexico with the Latin American Ensemble in January 2024 as a vocalist.
Ananias said she enjoyed playing multiple shows and having a different audience in a different place each time. In addition to her GLP experience, she also studied abroad in Copenhagen.
Grinnell’s Brazilian students have been a central support system and reminder of home for Ananias.
“We take a lot of time during our meals,” Ananias said. “Every time we go to D-Hall, it’s going to be about two hours because one hour, we’re going to be inside eating. The other hour we’re going to be playing pool.”
Beginning in the spring semester of her first year, Ananias began volunteering for BRASA’s global board, holding positions on both the conference team and technology team before becoming Chief Operating Officer (COO), a position she has held for a year.
“A lot of my friends and professors actually do not like BRASA,” Ananias said. “It takes a lot of my time, but I do tell them, I am very passionate about the organization and it has given me a lot.”
Ananias said she wanted to give back to the program. BRASA was also the playground for her to experiment with AI tools to benefit users. “They would give me the financial resources to actually put software to the public and have real users use it, which I think was a very hard thing to do as a student,” she said.
After graduation, Ananias plans to move to Miami, Florida to work as a software engineer at Microsoft. It was through a recommendation of someone she met through BRASA.
She is looking forward to living on the coast, and being in a city with a robust Brazilian diaspora.
Ananias said she is eager to have the freedom to pursue music for fun outside of academic work again.
“I have received some videos from my manager of Brazilians in the company playing music, so I am excited to meet them and be able to do that in an informal way,” she said.
