How Marium Ashraf found her footing in the tech community
Experience Ventures helped this software engineering student gain career traction
Trying to break into tech made Marium Ashraf feel like she was shouting into the void.
As a fourth-year software engineering student at Toronto Metropolitan University, she was applying constantly and building skills, but off-campus momentum proved hard to find.
Then, everything changed.
“I finally feel like I have a footing in the industry, and not like I am outside banging on some doors trying to get in.”
That footing came through Experience Ventures — a program powered by the Hunter Hub of 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.
Ashraf was matched with Lyrata, a cleantech startup trying to revolutionize indoor farming with SmartSoil — a low-carbon, 3D-printed alternative to traditional hydroponic growing media. Founder Adnan Sharif was looking for someone with strong prompt-engineering skills and systems thinking.
For Sharif, Experience Ventures has become a core part of how he works with early talent. As the founder of a fast-moving startup, he sees the program as a way to bring students into real projects without overwhelming them or the company.
“I like how the program is set up,” he says. “There’s a 100-hour cap, so it makes me really critically think about one key project for a student.”
Ashraf joined as an operations management intern, but her first weeks had very little to do with coding. She was tasked with observing how work actually happened inside Lyrata’s indoor farming operations and identifying bottlenecks — where things slowed down or relied too heavily on human memory.
“I noticed that there was always a mental checklist of what was being planted and what needed to be harvested,” she explains. “Not everyone knew what was going on, and there was a lot of back and forth.”
Drawing on her technical background, Ashraf designed a practical solution. Using the Slack API, Google Sheets, and low-code tools like Zapier, she built a simple system that allowed researchers to log planting and harvesting activity directly from Slack.
“They could just put in, ‘Hey, I just planted X amount at this location,’ and it would go through Slack into a Google Sheet,” she says. “So we can start collecting all this data.”
What started as a “baby bot,” as she calls it, quickly became foundational.
“Data is everything in today’s world,” she says. “For an early startup like us, it’s crucial.”
Her tool replaced paper tracking and informal updates with a centralized, living dataset across multiple sites — a small change with outsized impact. The experience reshaped how Ashraf thought about building software.
“I learned that sometimes the best coding programs are the ones designed for the people in mind. You may build something, give it to the researchers, let them play around with it, and then iterate until we get to the point where it really works for them.”
It’s an approach inspired by Sharif’s own philosophy as a founder. He emphasizes prioritization and iteration over perfection — especially in early-stage environments.
“I’ve been learning these things that I feel like I would never learn in school,” says Ashraf.
A week before her Experience Ventures placement ended in September, Sharif approached her with an opportunity at the Vector Institute. Through Vector’s DAROD (Data Readiness, Model Development, and Model Deployment) program, Ashraf became the technical lead on an internal AI project for Lyrata.
Over the next three months, she built an AI-powered tool that allows Lyrata’s researchers to query standard operating procedures in plain language. By the end of the program, she had a working proof of concept and a much broader sense of what she could build.
Today, Ashraf is hearing back from companies, getting interviews, and thinking differently about her future.
“I thought I would end up in a full stack software role,” she says. “But now I think it makes me a better coder, being able to look at things from an operations and people standpoint first.”