UTEC students take part in Silicon Valley Meetup

The Silicon Valley Meet-up is an event that takes place twice a year and brings newly graduates from the University Innovation Fellows (UIF) program together with the mentors group. The objective is for them share experiences, take lectures on entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as to put their soft skill to the test and further their knowledge through the different workshops that take place there.

The event has Stanford University as its main site, but it also includes visits to big companies in Silicon Valley, such as Microsoft and Google.

The event goes from March 14th until the 19th and provides fellows with a series of workshops that feature several different exercises and focus on subjects such as the creation and management of innovative spaces, the exploration of new education models and the design of new learning experiences.

This year, UTEC will send a group of six students. Four of them will be newly graduates and two other FABs, they will be accompanied by Francisca Barrios, UTEC’s Head of Creativity and Humanities. The first group will consist of Arianne Hernandorena, Camila Mauro, Diego Muñoz and Gonzalo Vidurrizaga, all of them recently graduated from the program, and the FABs will be Danae Chipoco, who is currently taking part of an internship in Germany, as well as myself, Hans Figueroa.

As a guest speaker, I’ll do a presentation on a project based on my personal research which combines engineering with psychology. The project is about and inequation, which is lifelike and allows you to hack good moments in order to make them potentially enormous. This inequation is tightly linked to entropy, which is explained within the second principle of thermodynamics. I’ve been working on it for two years and it has become my basic rule of action for decision making.

This event is definitely a unique and amazing experience. Not only because of the lectures and activities, but also because of the networking opportunities it allows us to have and the companies we visit, like Google, where we will attend lectures given by their Head of Innovation.

This is a very valuable experience for my academic development in matters of gaining knowledge. Nowadays, innovation is being considered a main field of studies, and to me it is very interesting to approach issues related to it constantly. My intention during this trip is to not only gain knowledge but to create a global network of contacts and enrich my resume so I can have a better chance of working in a company abroad.

Also, as graduates of this program we implemented a project on campus: the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Community (I&E Community) which helps UTEC students familiarize with these ideas. This year’s main objectives are to spread the entrepreneurial mindset, educate entrepreneurs and build a community.

My advice to any students that wish to join this program is to be aware of the innovation and entrepreneurship courses given at UTEC, to follow the I&E community closely and to never stop learning, because these would be fundamental for them to be good candidates for the program and to take good advantage of the opportunities given to them.

Hans Figueroa

Chemical Engineering student.