When Parnian Majd was in her second last year at TMU, she didn’t know what it meant to be an entrepreneur. It wasn’t until she found a job at the Office of Zone Learning that she came to experience this new world.
“I always thought that to start a business you had to have a lot of money and have a lot of business experience, or at least have a business education background,” says Majd, a TMU biomedical engineering graduate. “My time working at the Zones showed me how wrong I was.”
Majd is the founder of Fibra (external link) , a company developing smart underwear for women’s reproductive health that offers women an opportunity to access the right data at the right time in a non-invasive and hassle-free manner. Fibra is starting with fertility, but the next steps for the company will be pregnancy detection, pregnancy monitoring, contraceptives, menopause, and alerting women and girls if they have been exposed to any reproductive system diseases.
Narjes Allahrabbi, also a biomedical engineering student running a fertility company, was drawn to the idea of developing a fertility treatment that couples could use in the comfort of their own home. She launched Fertilead (external link) , a company focused on bringing new hope to couples with male-factor infertility, after studying point-of-care technology to be used for fertility treatment while she was pursuing her PhD in Singapore.
“I’m active in the Science Discovery Zone (SDZ) and Innovation Boost Zone (IBZ), which was helpful in my entrepreneurial journey as it helped me develop my business,” says Allahrabbi. “I took the ‘Scientist to Entrepreneur’ program at the SDZ to familiarize myself with what the entrepreneurship world might look like.”
At TMU, the Zone Learning Network celebrated Global Entrepreneurship Week – a global initiative that is an opportunity to celebrate and empower entrepreneurs – through events that introduced students to the more accessible side of entrepreneurship.
We caught up with Majd and Allahrabbi who transformed their side hustles into successful ventures by building an entrepreneurial mindset. They talked to us about how Zone Learning helped their ventures take off and how they developed skills in the real world.
