I did not arrive at entrepreneurship through a single lightbulb moment. I arrived through a series of detours; data recovery labs in Colombia, hospital records centres in Miami, university planning offices in Cali, each one teaching me something about how institutions work and, more importantly, how they sometimes fail the people they are meant to serve.
When I chose to pursue the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) at the University of Waterloo, I was carrying a question I had been turning over for years: Can business be the mechanism for change, not just the beneficiary of it? I had studied sustainability at Conestoga College, earned my BBA back home, and worked across three countries — but I still felt like I was on the outside of something. MBET felt like the door.
My focus within the program has been on sustainability and social impact ventures. I am drawn to the intersection of community need, environmental responsibility, and viable business models — the kind of work where you cannot afford to separate "doing good" from "doing it well." Right now, I am developing ideas around affordable and transitional housing, inspired in part by the rural housing crisis I have been learning more about in Eastern Ontario. I wanted to build something that holds dignity at the centre — not as a value statement, but as a design constraint.
The MBET program has pushed me in ways I did not fully anticipate. The courses sharpened my ability to pressure-test ideas quickly — to ask not just "is this meaningful?" but "is this fundable, scalable, and governable?" The community here is genuinely diverse: engineers, scientists, artists, people from every corner of the world who all chose this program because they wanted to build things that matter. That mix of perspectives has made me a more honest thinker. It is harder to fall in love with your own assumptions when someone across the table respectfully dismantles them.
Andres Felipe Toro, MBET '26
"I wanted to build something that holds dignity at the centre — not as a value statement, but as a design constraint."
My confidence has also evolved in quieter ways. I used to treat uncertainty as a problem to eliminate before moving forward. The program has helped me reframe it: uncertainty is not the enemy of entrepreneurship; it is the territory. Learning to act with conviction while remaining genuinely open to being wrong, that shift has been more valuable than any single framework or tool.