Dee Hon

It’s 5 p.m. on a Friday in January, but Kookai Chaimahawong isn’t clocking out from her workweek yet. This evening, she’s building an innovation and entrepreneurship course at her alma mater, the UBC Sauder School of Business. Chaimahawong works long hours...

Jessica Swinney started studying toward her new career in September 2020, the first autumn of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her school, BCIT, was like most institutions in the province—scrambling to deliver courses safely amid an unprecedented public health crisis.Most college and...

Barkley Sound is no Silicon Valley. These are wild ocean waters on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Humpbacks, grey whales and orcas migrate through each year, dining on a rich soup of krill, plankton, capelin and salmon. Most human...

Samantha Kolb travelled to Sri Lanka three years ago to work for the United Nations, helping the country with its reconciliation process after its 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009. The Victoria native had taken the internship during her...

Life Story: Bethany McNeill credits her athletic career for fostering the teamwork and leadership skills she’s used to start and run her insurance brokerage firm, MB Pension and Benefits Group, which does business as Momentum Benefits. The North Vancouver native...

Life Story: “What are the top problems for society for the century?” Devesh Bharadwaj asked himself while enrolled in the first year of a mechanical engineering degree at UVic. The question consumed him so much that he spent more time...

Life Story: By the time Sydney Koby graduated in 2013 with an engineering degree from Queen’s University in Ontario, a semester in Singapore had introduced her to scuba diving, travel and other ideas. “I didn’t want to be an engineer...

Life Story: Starting a business wasn’t on Marissa Grootes’ busy agenda in 2013, when she made a notebook-style planner to manage her schedule. The Zurich-born SFU communications grad was working full-time in design and marketing while selling jewelry on the...

Life Story: Six years ago, when Arman Mottaghi immigrated with his parents from Iran, he had few thoughts about becoming an entrepreneur or going into the construction industry. Today, he’s co-founder and CEO of Lambda Science, a two-year-old Vancouver startup...

Life Story: Amin Niri developed his passion for software from an early age. At 12, he started his own private World of Warcraft servers so he wouldn’t have to pay the game’s monthly fees. “It was really intriguing that I...

Hunter Macdonald made a life-changing discovery while studying mechanical engineering at Montreal’s McGill University and interning for NB Power in New Brunswick: he didn’t want to spend his career writing reports about hydroelectric dams. “I realized that I needed to...

November marks the start of drilling season in the Peace River Regional District in northeastern B.C. Temperatures start falling consistently below freezing, hardening the swampy roads that cut through the boreal forest outside cities like Fort St. John and Dawson...