Anna is a third-year business student at the University of São Paulo, she has joined the EPICentre team for the duration of the summer. Anna has been updating our readers on all her EPIC experiences.
I’ve been in Canada for almost a month now and I’m astonished. My colleagues and friends at EPICenter are amazing and are making my experience better than I could ever imagine. They are very polite and always make sure that I meet new people and get involved with the programs they host in here.
My colleague Sydney, in my second week here, organized a meeting with some of the owners of the companies that EPICentre helped to grow and develop. In general, they told us their history, the problems that they faced in the process, what changed since the beginning of the business and where they are now with it. It was great because I could see how inspiring their story was to everybody in the room including me and how important EPICentre’s work was in the process of developing their business. It was the first event that I went, and it made me glad to be part of the team that helped all their dreams come true. I got really motivated and joyful, after all, It was my first step into EPIC world.
After that, they took me to their Windsor Mold Group Makers’ Base in the engineering building and that was one of the most exciting places that ever went, it was wonderful! There they have a lot of 3D and laser printers, things that I don’t quite understand how it works because I’m a business student, but that I knew were very useful and nice. They also have two companies working there. More amazing is knowing that anyone, any student can use that space and they have a lot of interesting workshops there, I wish we had that back home. Everybody that has the opportunity should defiantly go there and see how amazing it is.
A few weeks later, we had two days of presentations, where people were pitching their ideas to try to get into one of the EPIC programs. This one, in particular, was the RBC EPIC Founders Program, in which the candidates were trying to get into a 12-week summer accelerator, where they would receive help to launch their business, participate in workshops and receive a stipend of $6,000 from the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). It was very interesting to see people’s business ideas and how advanced or not they were in that, along with having the opportunity to work with them and next to such an experienced team that EPICentre has and who can teach me a lot, is priceless. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to learn a lot with them and the workshops as the entrepreneurs will too, I’m already learning so much.
It was a discovery month for me, full of new things and people and every day I feel more and more like a new person with more things to tell and more desire to make a difference.
