How Marianne Vachon discovered new ways of thinking

A business student’s first-year foray into Experience Ventures changed her outlook

One university email changed the trajectory of Marianne Vachon’s first year at Université de Sherbrooke.

“I think most people just ignore those messages,” she says. “But I’m very curious. I saw this thing about an activity you could join, and I thought — okay, let’s try.”

The activity was Défis Nova, a semester-long challenge where interdisciplinary student teams collaborate with local organizations looking for innovative ideas.

Défis Nova is organized by QG de l’entrepreneuriat, Sherbrooke’s entrepreneurship hub, in partnership with Experience Ventures — a program powered by the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking at the University of Calgary and funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative (I-WIL). The program’s goal is to enable college and university students to practice entrepreneurial thinking alongside real-world innovators.

For Vachon, it was a rare chance to learn beyond the classroom.

“It was university-led, but not like a class,” she explains. “You worked on a real problem with a real organization. We were matched with a public hospital whose staff wanted to understand why sexually transmitted infections were increasing among 18- to 30-year-olds — and how to help stop it.”

The hospital’s staff asked the students to bring an outside perspective that could shake up the status quo.

“They were still putting posters up in bathrooms,” Vachon says. “But our generation doesn’t look at walls. We look at screens. So, we proposed more digital ways of reaching people. Things like social media, podcasts, even partnering with influencers.”

One of her team’s more unusual ideas involved creating a discreet way to ask for condoms at bars — a strategy inspired by the “angel shot” safety cue used to help people discreetly exit unsafe situations by alerting a bartender.

“In the end, we recommended expanding access to condom dispensers already used in some bar bathrooms and promoting those more effectively.”

Though the project lasted only a few months, the impact was lasting.

“I learned to stop trusting my first impression,” Vachon says. “At the beginning, I thought the issue was just that people didn’t care. But then we did interviews, and I saw that it wasn’t apathy — it was forgetting or not being aware of the risks. That really changed my perception.”

She also learned how to work across disciplines and cultural backgrounds, and each team member brought a distinct perspective. The medical student focused on the clinical aspects, the guidance student explored human and emotional motivations, and Vachon looked at structure and scalability.

“I was always thinking — how do we build this? How much does it cost? How do we make it work?”

She credits the project mentors for pushing her further than she expected.

“At first, I was frustrated. Every time we had an idea, our mentor would say, ‘Did you think about this? Or that?’ It felt like nothing was ever enough. But later, I realized that was the point. He helped us go deeper. It was so rewarding.”

Another standout moment was meeting professionals in the field, including a woman entrepreneur who had studied at Harvard.

“She has done so many things across different companies. I found her so inspiring, especially as someone studying business. I thought ‘Wow, this path is really open if you work for it.’”

The Experience Ventures project didn’t just give Vachon clarity on the issue at hand — it helped clarify her own ambitions.

“Business is what takes ideas and turns them into something real. That’s what I want to do.”

For now, she’s putting those lessons into practice during a summer internship at a large cheese factory, where she works in accounting, sales, and client relations.

Reflecting on Défis Nova, she says she’d recommend that type of challenge to any student — not just for the resume value, but for the human experience.

“In school, you learn to write papers. But this helped me to be more human. I learned how to ask questions, how to do interviews, and how to think in new ways. I loved it.”